Another thought, about how the Farmall changed farming. This tractor and others of the same type were meant to replace horses. This meant that fewer workers might be needed, and that feed crops that previously had gone to the horses could either be sold for money, or fed to more cattle. When World War II came along (1941 for the U.S.), many men who might have been available for farm work were drafted or enlisted in the military services. Farmers bought machines like combines, cornpickers and forage harvesters to replace the hired men. These machines are expensive, however, and no doubt a fair amount of the income from the farm had to go toward the purchase and maintenance of the machines. I see this as a kind of spiral which has led to the large farms of today, which are operated by very few people driving very big machines. My grandfather made a good living with 30 milk cows. Today, I am told by accountants, it takes 300 cows to make a profitable dairy--largely mechanized both in the barn and out. My father tried to make a living by growing corn and beans on about 150 acres, and found the income to be pretty sparse. The same accountant told me that it requires 2 or 3 thousand acres to make a good living with crop farming. Very expensive, however, because of the huge tractors, plows, harvesters, etc., needed to make the thing go. This may be primitive economics, but it seems to me, at least, that replacing horses--and lots of cheap manual labor--with machines has led to a totally different kind of farming, most unlike the "family farms" of 100-200 acres that I grew up with in the 1930s and 1940s. Now, it's a real business, needing, you guessed it, an accountant, as well as all the land and machinery I've just talked about. I'd be interested in the comments of active or recently-retired farmers about this. I did not go into farming for a living, even though I continued to help my father on his farm whenever I could right up to the time of his death in the late 1980s. My views are more of the armchair expert kind of thing--maybe just a puff of wind.
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Today's Featured Article - Choosin, Mounting and Using a Bush Hog Type Mower - by Francis Robinson. Looking around at my new neighbors, most of whom are city raised and have recently acquired their first mini-farms of five to fifteen acres and also from reading questions ask at various discussion sites on the web it is frighteningly apparent that a great many guys (and a few gals) are learning by trial and error and mostly error how to use a very dangerous piece of farm equipment. It is also very apparent that these folks are getting a lot of very poor and often very dangerous advice fro
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