The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

It was early summer, one of the very first 80-plus-degree days, and by 4:00 that afternoon, I’d had one service call too many. One too many dairy farmers who thought there was something wrong with his milk bulk tank. Refrigerated bulk tanks, for those of you who are not familiar with dairy farming, are where warm milk from the cows goes to cool.

To keep their Grade A milk status, that milk had to maintain a level of bacteria that did not exceed the milk buyer’s specifications. Too much bacteria from a poorly performing refrigeration system, and the farmer got paid less for that milk.

So farmer’s tended to become kind of excited that first warm day, when it was obvious their system was not doing what it should.

Warm weather had something to do with it, of course, but, more times than not, the farmer had not cleaned the condensing unit’s heat exchanger. It was a barn. It got dirty. As much as I told them about cleaning it, they mostly did not. For simplicity’s sake, that heat exchanger is pretty much like a car’s radiator. But car radiators are not exposed to a year’s barn dirt and dust.

“Hose that condenser out,” I would tell the farmer, who would insist that that was not the problem, come out and fix this thing!

Like I said: The first hot day. It was hot. I was hot. I came back into my hardware store that afternoon, finally having gotten to several farms, where I had pressure washed that “radiator.” 

I had just walked in when a  thirty-something-year-old guy hurried in the door and said to me: “YOU HAVE TO COME RIGHT NOW AND FIX THE BROKEN LINE ON THE LIQUID MOLASSES FEED!” (I put that in caps because that was how he stated it.”)

No, I told him, and I was talking in caps too: I don’t have to do anything! (Emphasis on the NO!)

We barked at each other for a bit, (It was hot.) got that out of our systems, and I walked over to the Farmer’s Elevator, to which he had just been hired as the boss. (He and I turned out to be good friends. Go figure.) 

That elevator has been there a long time. A lot of grain had been stored, moved, ground, mixed and whatnot over the years, and a 12-inch-deep accumulation of white dusty flour had sifted through  the floor boards and accumulated in the crawl space. Guess where that line had broken? Clear in there about forty feet.

Oh, man. Friday afternoon. Quitting time. Oh, well. I crawled in there, found the break in a 1-inch black 100-psi plastic line, right amidst all the exploded molasses. I came out half a snowman, went to the store, got what I needed, crawled back in, fixed that line, and hollered out: “Okay. Turn’er on.”

I lay there amidst the banks of fluffy white flour, and heard the pressure in the line begin to go up. There was a slight whine at first, which slowly increased. And increased some more. AND INCREASED TOO…..!” 

Just as I hollered: “TURN IT OFF!” there was a LOUD POP! That line full of liquid molasses exploded! Coated me in that black gooey tar.! Stirred up a storm of flour dust!

I crawled out of there looking like a snowman!

Well, now we knew the problem: The pressure regulator on the molasses pump was faulty.

But I still had to get more repair parts from the hardware store, crawl back into that blizzard of flour, fix it, come home looking like a snowman, late for supper.

Like all refrigeration and cooling service people, I grew to hate that first hot day of summer.