Editor/Daughter’s Note: When he was a teenager my dad lived for three years on an isolated island farm where he spent more and more time with the skipper, dreaming about a life at sea, something that so alarmed his family they moved him to Fyn.

Thinking ‘out of sight, out of mind’ they quickly moved me from the rather isolated island of Siø, without any modern amenities that we associate with civilization, to a farm in Fyn (Funen), a place they hoped would be interesting enough that I would forget about going to sea.

The Carl Sorensen Farm

So now I lived in Fyn and was employed by Carl Sorensen, a small farmer with a very intensive farming operation. Moving from Siø to Fyn had the effect of being in a time machine and jumping a number of years into the future.

Carl had a large herd of high-performing dairy cows; he also raised a large number of bulls because of this high performance. He had two teams of large Belgian horses, each as big as big yellow on Siø, and a highly ill-tempered herdsman, Olav*.

The other farmhand Soren and I took off on our holidays for a trip around the islands of Denmark and biked all over them.

We biked across Storstromsbroen Bridge and it was impressive. It is now an important link between Germany and Sweden with ferry connections from Fehmem to Falster.

Carl had old buildings on the farm but with so many animals he had over 40 tons of manure per acre to be plowed under, almost more than the plows could manage.

The summer I was there Carl had a huge harvest, way too much to store in his buildings, so it was carefully stacked outside in a way that rain would not penetrate into it.*When I visited Denmark in 1993 my brother Knud told me Olav wanted to meet me again He said, “We better take you there first, or you know how miserable he can get.” At the time Olav was now 80 years old, and also long a farmer himself, with numerous prizes and ribbons he had won at cattle fairs.

• More of My Dad’s Stories.
• More of My Dad’s Paintings.