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.
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Today's Featured Article - Tractor Profile: Allis-Chalmers Model G - by Staff. The first Allis-Chalmers Model G was produced in 1948 in Gasden, Alabama, and was designed for vegetable gardeners, small farms and landscape businesses. It is a small compact tractor that came with a complete line of implements especially tailored for its unique design. It featured a rear-mounted Continental N62 four-cylinder engine with a 2-3/8 x 3-1/2 inch bore and stroke. The rear-mounted engine provided traction for the rear wheels while at the same time gave the tractor operator a gre
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