Mounted corn pickers

I always thought a mounted corn picker was a neat piece of machinery. Never operated one - I've only got experience with the tow behinds. Seems like they would be tough on the tractor with all the extra weight and would sink in the mud pretty easy. Were they that popular over a pull type?

(quoted from post at 17:07:46 01/05/10) I always thought a mounted corn picker was a neat piece of machinery. Never operated one - I've only got experience with the tow behinds. Seems like they would be tough on the tractor with all the extra weight and would sink in the mud pretty easy. Were they that popular over a pull type?

Click to expand...

Dad had 3 JD mounted pickers... a 226 mounted on an A and two 227s mounted on 60s. I was old enough to run the second 60 with one quite a bit in the falls of '59 and '60, before I left for the service in '61. If anything, they just added to the traction, we never had any weight problems on the JDs. I have heard of problems with IHs with 2MEs or 2MHs mounted on them... sorry, I know this is the IH forum.

There is a lot of them out there. Production numbers listed were pretty high on a couple. I have a field the guy would like in corn next summer and I looked at a couple of mounted pickers this past year. Couple issues concerned me. I would probably want to have a tractor dedicated to the thing. Looks to be a headache to put on and take off the tractor. I was hearing a LOT about fires, too. Not sure what catches and how severly BUT I did see an extinguisher on pretty much every one I looked at. Lot of stuff happening in close proximity to the operator.

i have always had a mounted picker. and grampa before me always had a mounted picker. neither of us ever broke an axle or burnt one up. before tractors grew to over fifty horsepower a mounted picker would go through soft ground alot better than a pull type would. i don't think it's that much of a job to put a new idea picker on. the old ih's were a little harder but the 234 ih could be put on from thr tractor seat with the fast hitch.

I agree - they are a neat piece of equipment. But, if you ever start to mess with one, just remember this: They will take your hand off faster than Tiger Woods chasing a blonde.

They were great for pheasant hunting! A shotgun would ride very nicely on the elevators. Occasionally, you could get a coyote -- there was a bounty on coyotes in those days.

Back in sixtys Dad started to move morning glory vines that were up near seat and chain caught them and someway pulled fingers on right hand through sprocket, lost all finger right up to palm of hand.

After you've picked a few bushel(40-50,000) with a mounted picker you'll be glad to have a pull type. It's a lot better being out front in the cab then right in the middle of all the dirt and noise. And I had a pretty good mounted unit 234 IH on an 856.

Back in the day mounted pickers far out numbered pts. As a kid growing up we had either a &20 or #24 on an H. Wasn't anything more than snapping rollers & an elevator, didn't have a husking bed so left the corn pretty "dirty" We did pick quite a bit of pop corn for a local company with it just because of not having a husking bed, did cracck the hull of the kernal as bad as a picker with husking beds. Stress cracks would cause the kernal not to pop. I only ran it once or twice.

Last couple years we put up ear corn we used the neighbors 2MH on our SM in exchange for them using our tractor to pick some ear corn. With the 2MH you sat down inbetween the row units with chains moving on each side of you where as with the #20/24 you sat more up above the units. I can only remember running the 2MH once

Use to be when pickers were common you saw a lot of farmers with missing fingers or hands from getting them caught in the pickers. My uncle that raised me got his hand caught in the #20, really tore it up but luckily he didn't lose any fingers but that hand always gave him problems after that. He was in the barnlot with the picker & was having problems & had the belt pulley engaged & his foot on the clutch. He reached around to do something & his foot slipped off the clutch. he was wearing leather gloves, the kind that had a steel ball on the leather thongs to tighten the gloves & the steel ball caught in a moving part pulling his hand in.

I cal also recall sveral guys that were burnt in picker fires. Good friend of my uncle was severely burnt with 3rd dgree burns over much of his face , arms & upper torso. I know he was very adamant about keeping the picker cleaned off & always ran spark arrestors on the mufflers.

I was raised in NE Iowa in the heart of "corn country" and I can honestly say I never heard of a fire on a picker... I suppose there were some though. Our tractors always had screens enclosing the sides of the engine and enlarged air intake screens on the front for the radiators. Dad had a fire extinguisher mounted on both of his JD 227s (along with a box for an Iver Johnson .410 on top of the husking bed), but never had to use the extinguisher. I do know farmers that had lost fingers, but not nessesarily in corn pickers, and I don't know that mounted would be any more dangerous than a pull type. We did eat a lot of pheasant while picking corn for ourselves and neighbors.
And cabs were unheard of at that time, or I would probably have prefered a pull type.

I was raised in central Iowa (Waterloo area), and farmers out there mostly used mounted pickers for several reasons:

1. Mounted pickers let you go thru muddy fields much easier than a pull type. Same as today...farmers don't want to sit around waiting for a field to dry if they don't have to. The narrow fronts didn't help things, though.
2. With high yielding corn, nobody wanted to run down corn when "opening" a field. Pull types knocked down so much corn when opening a field I saw some farmers and their whole families out picking up ear corn after the picker went thru it. (Not every field had good fences for cattle or hogs to glean the field).
3. With our mounted picker, we would get requests from farmers with pull types to open their fields...we did it but didn't like it because we never knew what we might hit or fall into along fencerows.
4. Mounted picker owners were always proud of their machines and pull type machines were kind of a sign that you weren't really a serious corn grower. Strange to say, but true. Kind of like some guys today with diesel pickups. (This is not to offend anyone, but it was what it was).

I liked running mounted pickers (#24 on an H Farmall, 2MEs on SM). But they were dusty and awfully cold in November. My uncle once said he got so cold running his picker that he could drink one cup of coffee and p** three of them.

Yes, farmers lost fingers and whole hands with pickers, I had a couple close escapes. If the mounted picker didn't get you, the power take-off on a pull type could because too many farmers left the pto running while cleaning out a pull type. When combines became popular the prevalence of farmers with missing fingers went way down.

Yes, mounted pickers would catch fire. I once helped a farmer put out a mounted picker fire (M diesel tractor) and that fire kept reigniting...but didn't blow up like a gas tractor could. I recall many times the local rural fire trucks trying to put out corn fields that were on fire (the tractor and picker were burnt hulks by the time the fire truck got there). That white smoke would bring farmers from everywhere...they knew what had happened.

Sorry for the long post. These old memories of old iron are fun!
LA in WI

(quoted from post at 12:16:57 01/06/10) I was raised in central Iowa (Waterloo area), and farmers out there mostly used mounted pickers for several reasons:
LA in WI

Click to expand...

I was 50 Mi. NE of Waterloo and 50 NW of Dubuque. The mounted pickers with husking beds beside the driver were almost like having a Heat Houser on the tractor... much warmer than a pull type unless you had the HH on it. Also the second JD 60 Dad bought had a Char-Lynn PS on it and that was a very good hand warmer. The platform of the tractor was heated by the tranny, so with warm headgear and coveralls, it wasn't bad. We too opened a lot of fields and also custom picked.
Dad worked off the farm as a carpenter at that time and work was slow when the weather was cold, so he did custom picking during the week. I ran it a lot after school and weekends and in '60 I had graduated and had some ground rented from the local banker in addition to farming Dad's.
From '56 to '58 we only farmed 100 acres with a Super C and I pulled a Woods Bros. single row picker with that. '59 and '60 we rented extra ground and Dad got his second '60 then, but I did much of the farming from '56 thru '60 while he carpentered.
When I left for the USAF in Jan. '61, he sold the 60, 3x14 plow, 10' disc and 227 picker to his brother who farmed near Manchester, because my younger brothers were too young.

My uncle had a 2ME mounted on a Super MTA. I helped him one year(1961) and because the fall was real wet he decided to wait until the ground froze to finish the corn picking,(bad....real bad mistake). The %&$*%#@ ground never froze solid enough to hold up the tractor/picker going up the red clay hills and we got stuck or nearly stuck several times, the LAST time real bad. A tractor/picker stuck in the middle of a corn field going up a sidehill opening up a new land is HORRIBLE! We pulled the nearly full wagon of ear corn out backwards okay with uncle's W6 and never knocked down any corn, BUT the tractor/picker was another story, We knocked down about 8 rows of corn before we got it out and it was mud underneath it from he!! to breakfast. "SOB'in' thing was really stuck on this red clay sidehill. We handpicked corn off the knocked down and "unpickable" stalks for 6 hours. and spent a day cleaning up and fixing up the tractor/picker. Uncle picked some more corn in various fields but it never did freeze hard enough to risk trying to pick it all and he waited until the ground dried up enough in the following spring, then put the picker back on the tractor and picked the rest.

I had a 2-MH on my Super M-TA. Did a nice job of picking corn.

My dad had a #24 mounted picker on the Super H for many years in South Dakota. The thing I remember about it was that it shelled a lot of corn in the field and was really good for attracting the ducks for duck hunting in the corn fields in the fall (we lived near the Missouri river). It also did a poor job of husking the corn unless it was damp in the morning. When I was in high school and in college my dad always had me run the combine, but he would never let any of us kids run the corn picker. He said too many people lost body parts on those corn pickers. I think I only drove the corn picker maybe one round and the thing I remember was all those moving parts surrounding you on the tractor seat. He later bought a 2-PR pulltype and had the neighbor with a mounted picker open the fields. Roger

I just barely remember my grandfather's 2M picker on an MD. He later traded for a 2ME and Dad got a 2ME for his MD. Most of our neighbors had mounted cornpickers, some had 2MH's, New Ideas, 227 John Deeres and one Massey Ferguson.
My step mother-in-law's 1st husband owned a self propelled Massey Harris 2 row cornpicker.