changing times of farm machinery

I just saw an ad for a Case corn picker that does 16 rows. As a kid growing up in the 60's we were doing big business if we could do 2 rows. I'm always amazed at the size of today's machinery. Makes my M and 1-PR picker seem kind of small.

I remember (small as I was at the time) when my Dad went from a single-row pull-type picker to a 2-MH mounted picker on the M. 16 Rows? What we would do with that thing?

If there is as much change in the next 70 yrs that I've seen Oh My. I can remember Dad planting with team of horses 2 row (checkrow IH) I had to change wire at the end of the rows. Harvest, corn binder, for silage or husker shreader. Now the fellow that farms the farm has Cat tractors equiment to match and a Cat combine on tracks to harvest. I've seen ever thing in between. And enjoyed ever bit of it!!!!

I started to notice a change in 1949 when I was 16 when we had the silos filled using a chopper and dump trucks. It would take 3 weeks of long days to fill using the silage cutter and using a 10-20 tractor on the belt. They filled both big silos in 3 days. Still used the 10-20 on the blower. Hal

(quoted from post at 17:31:02 02/13/10) I just saw an ad for a Case corn picker that does 16 rows. As a kid growing up in the 60's we were doing big business if we could do 2 rows. I'm always amazed at the size of today's machinery. Makes my M and 1-PR picker seem kind of small.

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My wife's cousin bought her irrigated land a couple of years ago. He farms several irrigated quarters of land and has a big JD combine and 16 row header for corn. He said he can fill one of his semi trailers in [b:1c843b2029]20 minutes[/b:1c843b2029].
As a high school kid, I picked a lot of acres with a JD 60 and a 227 mounted picker and thought that was hot stuff.

Yes it does make your stuff look small. But did your machinery cost between a quarter and half a million dollars to buy? And I'll bet your stuff is paid for. How would you like to pay just the interest or rental on that huge stuff? Not me, no way. I have watched too many good farmers get caught up in the 'bigger is better' kind of farming and it almost always ends the same way. Bankrupcy and Sale Bill in the paper. These guys are usually broke 3 years before they even know they are broke.

On a side note, we had the NE DOT send an officer to our tractor club for a lesson. He told us that in Nebraska there is no width restriction on farm machinery. I suppose you would be liable if you caused an accident but there is no law that says you can't be out there even if you take up the whole road and then some.

Most folks around here seem to take the heads off on the big equipment when moving it on the roads. The newer heads come off very fast and can be trailered quicker.

Not long ago, I met a farmer from Iowa who planted something like 2200 acres. My father
had 140 and 30 cows in N.J., and managed to (just) eke out a living in the 1930s and 1940s. I was talking to this fellow about tractors, and said that I had once driven a neighbor's big
Case for a few minutes, but that the biggest tractor I had used a lot was a Super M. He said his biggest tractor had about 400 h.p. and, in his words, "It'd pull that thing in two." Times have changed, indeed. And a few years ago, I talked to an accountant who did taxes for farmers, and he told me that a dairyman needed 300 cows to make a decent living. Compare that to my father's 30! Of course, the "old" way implied absolutely that a farmer and his family did a lot of other things, like keeping a BIG garden, with an orchard (fresh in the summer, canned or buried for the winter), raising and slaughtering a few pigs, keeping a flock of chickens for meat and eggs (some to sell at market), and being a general handyman when it came to carpentering, plumbing and maybe even electricity, if you were at all "mechanical." It has always intrigued me to wonder if a farmer who wanted to live the "old" way, by doing all this stuff on the side, could even pay the land taxes on the small income from a few cows or
a couple of crops grown on a hundred or 150 acres. One of the changes I witnessed in the 1940s was the changeover from hand labor (20 people involved in threshing or silo-filling) to machines--automatic balers, green-hay or -corn choppers, corn-pickers, combines. Anybody into farming today knows that machines can do a lot, fast, but that it takes a lot of crops to pay for them. Kind of goes round and round, doesn't it? Do more, but need more to pay for doing more!
I must say that I LOVED the old harvests, when all the uncles and cousins and their hired men came around with their tractors and wagons and trucks and the coming-and-going went on for several days on EACH of the farms (2 uncles and an aunt each had a small dairy farm). The noise of the thresher or ensilage-chopper was just
wonderful, at least for this machine-happy kid. My father eventually hired a cousin to come in with a McCormick-Deering 42R combine. He and I used to do the combining with an F-20. We'd trade off between driving and doing the bagging on the platform. I loved that, too, but it was nothing like the great excitement of the old harvest.