COON VALLEY — Ernest Haugen opens the barn door and calls his cows. “Come-BOSS! Come-BOSS!” Once more, but no sign of them. “I’ll go get them.”

He trudges up the hill, where the girls, Lucky Lady and Sarah, have found some shade. He pokes them on the rump and they head for the barn. A young Jersey bull and the neighbor’s herd of black Angus follow, and a handful sneak into the barn.

Ernest shoos them out and closes the stanchions on each of the cows as the munch hay.

His brother, Joseph, gives some of the morning milk to two calves at the other end of the barn. During the day they eat grass that Ernest cut with a scythe.

Ernest sits on a three-legged stool, a plastic pail clamped between his knees, and begins milking Lucky Lady the way he learned decades ago.

“It’s a good way to rest,” he says.

It’s well deserved. The brothers, real Norwegian bachelor farmers, have worked this land longer than any neighbors can remember.

The herd — once 34 cows — is gone, sold off in 2002. The brothers keep just a couple of cows now, mostly for their own milk and butter.

Joseph, 86, brags that in 47 years he missed only one milking — for “yuree duty.”

They got a milking machine in the 1960s but say didn’t use it regularly until their father got sick in 1980.

“He thought the cows held onto their milk,” Ernest said.

Their father, Johan, bought the farm in 1925, 13 years after arriving from Norway. The house dates from 1864.

It’s a quarter mile walk to the mailbox. Ernest doesn’t mind. As a boy, he walked two miles across the ridge to Erickson school. He said his marks were good and his teacher recommended he go to high school, but his father wouldn’t let him.

Joseph says he got an F in school.

“You know what for? Farming,” he says with a grin. “If you got an A, it was for Agriculture.”

He asks a visitor if he plays checkers. Says he’s only been beaten six times.

Joseph does most of the cooking. Ernest bakes the bread and chocolate oatmeal cookies. He credits his health to a daily breakfast of oatmeal. And a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar.

Their English is inflected with a Norwegian accent. The brothers both speak their parents’ native tongue, though Ernest says his Norwegian is “not perfect.”

In 1985, Ernest visited the Glomstad farm where his father worked in Norway. Joseph stayed home to milk.

Johan Haugen was one of the first to sign up with the government’s soil conservation program in the early 1930s which got its start in the Coon Creek watershed.

After 70 years of traditional farming — with wide rows of earth tilled straight up and down the steep slopes — most of the topsoil had washed away. There was a gulley Ernest says was deep enough to swallow a horse.

The program offered five years of free seed and fertilizer — a boost for cash-strapped farmers in the early days of the Great Depression.

Some were distrustful of the government, Ernest said. Until they saw the results.

The Haugens harvested 21 loads of hay in 1934. The next year, they said, it was over 100.

“The barn was full,” Joseph said.

It worked then, and the brothers stuck with it.

James Radke was the Vernon County soil conservationist from 1980 to 2004. He says he didn’t meet the Haugens right away, mostly because they hewed so closely to the original conservation plan.

“There are a lot of changes, but the Haugens have held close to their principals in a very conservative way,” said Burton Lee, a Coon Valley farmer a few years younger. “They’ve done their best to preserve something that doesn’t fit new prices.”

The Haugens bought their first tractor — a John Deer “B” — in 1941. The newest machine in the shed is from 1953.

“We are the ones that wear out,” says Ernest.

He is 90 and says he gets tired now walking uphill. Says he can’t run like he could a couple of years ago. But he hikes through the pastures in his Key Imperial overalls, crawling under barbed wire fences.

Ernest remembers when he was 13 and watching the CCC crews survey and terrace the pasture.

“You’re standing on the first modern terrace made in the United States,” he says as he walks through the knee-high wild carrot and red clover. “This is what I want to preserve.”

The Haugens have approached the Mississippi Valley Conservancy about putting the 160-acre farm into a conservation trust. Ernest doesn’t want to see houses built on the ridge top or to see the terrace work torn out to accommodate a big-scale corn operation.

Abbie Church, a conservation specialist with the Mississippi Valley Conservancy, says the Haugen farm is perfect for preservation. The land is visible from Coon Valley, has a rich mix of hardwood trees and is historically significant as part of the nation’s first watershed conservation project.

“Coon Creek has come full circle from being an embarrassment,” she said. “The next step is to make sure the improvements stay.”