My dad traded the team of horses for a tractor. I don’t know exactly when, but it must have been shortly after the war. I remember riding on and even driving that first tractor, but that first Ford 8N or 9N was replaced before I started school. What I remember best about that first tractor was the starter, which was a big black rubber knob next to the steering wheel. On the next two tractors we owned the starter button was metal and next to the gear shift.
I learned to drive tractor sitting on Dad’s lap. The easiest tractor driving job was driving the tractor for the hay wagon picking up bales in the field. When I was old enough to wrestle bales up from the ground onto the wagon and no one was around to drive, we would put the tractor in the lowest gear and let it steer itself, running over and adjusting the steering wheel when it wandered too far astray. A little kid who could not even drag a bale was better than no driver at all, so I had to drive, but when I was big enough and strong enough, I was on the ground, wrestling bales onto the wagon.
Dad did not like horses, he said, although I never saw him happier than when he was working with animals. When he was growing up, he was always the first out of bed in the morning, going out to bring the horses into the horse barn and giving them a feed of grain, then harnessing them up for the day’s work in the fields. He resented his father and his brother who slept in and went out to milk the cows after he had been up for an hour. His mother had the best deal: she did not get up until even later to make breakfast, which was served after milking.
According to Dad, horses, unlike tractors, do not follow orders well. Turn the steering wheel right and the tractor turns right; pull the right reigns and the team will turn right if it feels like it. Dad claimed he never once had to catch a tractor to harness it up in the morning, but as the season wore on, the horses got better and better at avoiding the harness and Dad had to get up earlier each morning to get his breakfast before he had to start work in the fields.
Ah, but what about the warm relationship between man and beast? Dad would roll up his sleeve to show the scar on his upper arm where a big Belgian bit him so hard his arm was in a sling for a month.
Sometime after the war ended, a horse broker showed up and offered Grandpa a new Ford Ferguson tractor for the team and a few hundred dollars. Grandpa was not interested, but Dad spoke up. He was old enough to have a say in the running of the farm by then. Dad had looked at tractors and he liked the low, wide profile and 3 point hitch of the Ferguson’s and he knew the price was good. Grandpa had begun driving a car instead of a horse and buggy long ago and a tractor was not a new idea, so Dad was able to convince Grandpa to trade the horses. In an old notebook where Dad kept his accounts in those days, I discovered that Dad paid four hundred dollars for the tractor from his savings from odd jobs and the twenty dollar a month allowance that Grandpa gave him. Grandpa contributed the team, maybe more. The notebook did not say.
Field Corn Eight Inches Tall
We had a good rain today and yesterday. My renter’s field corn is doing well– it’s at least eight inches tall now. I planted my sweet corn later– dad always said sweet corn does better if it is planted after the soil is good and warm. Now that I am trying to grow a crop of sweet corn, I realize that I don’t know what “good and warm” means, but I waited two weeks after the field corn was planted to plant my sweet corn. We’ll see. The rain has brought on growth. I’ll be cultivating this weekend. It will be the third time already. I suspect I am over cultivating, but I don’t intend to use any herbicide and I don’t want to do any more hand hoeing than absolutely necessary.
I am not an organic farmer, but I avoid herbicides, pesticides, and cormmercial fertilizer. I am not an organic farmer because I reject reductionism. I do not make decisions based on slogans or rules of thumb. Some day, when I have a good reason, I may decide to use a pesticide. If I decide that, it will be because I have considered all the evidence and the consequences. On the whole, I think using pesticides and herbicides is a risky proposition, but there may be situations when not using them is even riskier. Rejecting those possibilities out-of-hand is irresponsible sloth, at least as bad as blindly accepting the self-serving claims of the chemical salesmen.
Pulling Down the Blower Pipe
We have not filled the silo since the early 80s when my dad was lifting a cow with a block and tackle. The cow was down with milk fever. The old block and tackle broke and cow collapsed on my dad, his knee shattered. That convinced him it was time to retire. I helped him sell the herd the next week. The silo was almost full and the silage was left to settle and dry out for the next twenty years.
Usually, the first step in filling silo is to to hoist the blower pipe that conducts the silage from the blower at the bottom of the outside of the silo to the top of the silo. The heavy eight inch pipe was hoisted to the top of the silo with a cable attached to the pipe and run through a pulley at the top of the silo. The cable was pulled by a tractor on the ground. This was a tense job that could turn into a disaster at any moment. At our place, with its uniquely designed concrete silo, my dad always took the most dangerous job: he would climb to the top of the silo, crawl on his hands and knees on a shaky two by ten plank from the silo ladder to the opposite point on the other side of the silo where the blower pipe would enter. That plank and his sense of balance was the only thing between him and a forty foot drop to the bottom of the empty silo.
When the other farmers who dad filled silo with were all dead or retired, dad no longer had to take the shared pipe down each year, and so it stayed right there, until yesterday.
That pipe had been nagging at me. It was chained to the silo roof sill, but never secured at the bottom and it has been blowing back and forth in the wind more and more the last few years. The plank dad used has been up in the top of the silo, exposed to the weather and insects. It can not be trusted to cross the chasm like dad used to.
My wife and I moved in with dad to take care of him and the farm for his last few years. It has been four years since he died and we took over. We have curious, lively, and fearless seven year old twin grandsons who are around the place all the time. I fret about what might happen if the blower pipe let loose and fell when they happened to venture to the base of the silo.
Yesterday, I decided to do something about the pipe. I had open heart surgery last fall and I am in no condition to climb up to the top of the silo, attach a cable and pulley and lower the pipe the proper way. The roof of the silo is already in bad shape from age and weather, so I decided a little more damage would be a small price for the peace of mind I would gain from having that old pipe on the ground. So I decided to attach a cable to the pipe and pull it down with my tractor.
It took two pulls and met with only moderate success. The first pull separated the pipe at the expansion joint. The second pull got the rest of the pipe but it separated at the connection to the distributor hood, leaving the distributor hood, the part that directed the silage blown upward by the blower back down into the silo, danging from the sill and hooked over the side of the silo.
Not ideal, but much better. Most of the weight has been removed from the chain suspending the pipe from the sill and the hood is firmly hooked over the side of the silo so even if the chain and sill were to let go, the hood would still be held up.
An improvement, although I must continue to scheme about getting the last bit down.