Farming the old fashion way

Older implements still being used

opps

Looks like my operation. 'cept my stuff is red.

I had a combine just like that, I think it was a model 25. Had a big long cylinder that would really make the tractor grunt if you ran a slug or clump of weeds in there ! Did a great job though.

It's a 30. No canvas. I had two of them.

Looks like just another day on the farm, I see nothing wrong or out of date here. It starts and runs and does the job it was intended for and the best part it's paid for ! Bandit

Mine is green but oliver. We had a Minneapolis windrower never forget the day's that you plugged them up. It was fun watching the old 2 cylinder taking care of a slug that front end would really bounce

Yes, Mine had a canvas...that was the only bad part of the machine as I recall.

HEY That looks like my 620 and cultivator. Now I have to go look to see if it's still in the shed. lol

Do you have a loader for yours?

I saw a young collector out cultivating corn on his dad's field with a C Allis last summer. It's a strange sight to see in this day of RR corn. Two rows at a time seems to take forever compared to the units out there now.

My brother took over the family farm after Dad passed away; farmed with used machinery until he retired. One of the BTO's came to my brother one day and asked what he was doing wrong (he bought all new machinery) because someone at the bank let it slip that my brother had more net worth than the BTO had. Needless to say, brother was upset with the banker after that incident.

My brother was a great one for making tandem hitches. He bought two used 6-row planters when they went out favor with the big farmers, made a tandem hitch and planted 12 rows at a time. He made a tandem hitch to pull two used field cultivators with. He bought large used tractors to get the HP he needed to pull the tandem equipment, but they were tractors that were not in vogue. He bought a 285 HP Versatile tractor real cheap; used it for years and after he retired sold it to our nephew, who is still running it. Nephew dumped his JD 4WD when he found it cost more to repair than it was worth. The old Versatile just keeps on going.

As a kid I cultivated with the 620 w/front cult and with a three point cult on a different tractor. I liked the 620 and the front mount because I could see what I was doing without turning around.

My brother went to a couple auction sales and bought two used JD 14ft. press drills real cheap. He hooked them together on one of his homemade multiple hitches so he could plant a 28ft. wide strip at a time. Press drills had fallen out of favor, although it was well known that they usually produced better yields than the air seeders. His equipment cost was probably 1/10th to 1/20th of what the BTO's were spending. He never financed any equipment so paid no interest. If the soil was soft so the wheel tractor left tracks during seeding, he'd pull the drills with one of the old crawlers so he'd have a smooth field for harvest and a more even stand. And the air seeders had to lay down more seed to get a stand in that soil, so their seed costs were higher.

The grain didn't know nor care whether it was planted with a $200 machine or a $20,000 machine. When he started growing sunflowers, I designed a sunflower harvesting attachment for the combine. We bought less than $200 worth of iron, used a little scrap and made a header attachment that worked as well as the $8000 - $10000 headers the BTO's bought. He used that attachment for about 10 years before he quit sunflowers after the contract price went down.

After he retired, he had no trouble selling his equipment, as long as the multiple hitches that he made went with it!

What year would a combine like that have been...we had a new JD shaped like that but it had a reel I think... replaced an IH one with a power unit on it in the mid to late 50s... a little kid can sure pick up a vocabulary watching his dad and brothers cranking one of them pwr. units.

Nice setup. What part of the country is this?

There's a similar JD reel combine at my grandparents old place but it's far gone.

The old man bought a new 12A JD in the late spring of 1949 That one had a canvas table and a bagger with a scour clean The engine sat right under the seat on the bagger, Now mister I wanna tell ya that on a hot summer day riding that thing setting on top of that engine and you would say words that you didn't know how to spell. And to start cranking that no good son of a #$%@ .One guy would crank for a while and the other guy would crank the #$%@ thing. We always let it idle when we went to the house for dinner. Boy was I glad when we stopped running that thing. I think the 12A combine cost 1750 dollars and the JD dealer delivered it with a new 1949 JD A that cost 2000 brand new. It's easy to remember all this because I had to ride that thing and bag and tie the bags of grain. The old man wouldn't trust me at 10 years old to drive that BIG JD A pulling that new combine How we have changed.