As someone who loves to burn candles and buy fun, new scents often, you could say I’m a lover of good aromas. And, while I love the classic smells of sugar cookie, daisy, autumn woods, and sea breeze in candle form, none of those quite compare to some of the best smells to be found right on the farm. Spending every day on our dairy farm means my nose is hit with a slew of fragrances — these are on an extreme spectrum of nauseatingly terrible to nostalgia-inducing bliss.
As I pulled into our main farm’s driveway today with my windows down, I was immediately engulfed in the best smell on earth (in my humble opinion): fresh-cut hay. My dad was working on hauling round bales of second-crop alfalfa in from the fields, and that unmistakable smell was everywhere. We later unloaded our hay racks of small square bales. While that task is one of the most exhausting, the smell does make up for it in the tiniest of ways. Making hay is the equivalent of an air freshener for all the neighbors.
Other amazing fragrances we encounter on our farm are the spring lilac blooms, dewy grass during early-morning chores, sweet molasses when we dump out a new bag of calf starter, freshly chopped corn silage, and dried cornstalks in the fall. Those are a few of my favorite scents on our dairy, and I can only imagine some of the specific aromas to be found on other types of farms.
Now, I know good smells and farms don’t exactly go hand-in-hand, nor does the correlation likely come to mind for the average person. While the good smells are heavenly, we are obviously hit with some of the absolute worst stench on the farm as well. When it’s time to clean out bedded packs, scrape up old feed from bunkers, stir up the manure pits to pump them out, or get splattered with manure while moving cattle, you can bet I don’t wish to make a candle using those scents.
But all in all, those who have had the privilege of soaking in some of those great smells I mentioned earlier can probably agree that they are some of the best you will find.
The author dairy farms with her parents and brother near Hawkeye, Iowa. The family milks approximately 300 head of grade Holstein cows at Windsor Valley Dairy LLC — split half and half between a double-eight parallel milking parlor and four robotic milking units. In the spring of 2020, Molly decided to take a leap and fully embrace her love for the industry by returning full time to her family’s dairy.