Cultivator vs. Scuffler..Wheel Plow vs.Disc

I was reading this post and thought I’d add my $0.02.
My post is a little different as it’s not exactly about implements.
I grew up in a small community that had a large 4 room school for the 1 st to the 4 th grade…. only there wasn’t enough kids, so all 4 grades were taught in one room.
It was a small community, with only a few small time farmers.
A couple of diaries with 2, 3 or maybe 6 “fresh”cows at any one time.
Since there wasn’t much in the way of crops, there were only a few tractors around.
If you had asked me at the age of 16 to name how many brands of tractors there were and what they were, you would have gotten the answer of "3" brands, Ford, Ford-Ferguson and Case. There were several 9n, 2n, and 8n’s around, but I thought they were all the same, and there was one old steel wheeled Case (which happens to still be around and running)
At the age of 17 when I went to High School, I learned there was another brand of tractor.
The guy that lived by the school had 3 or 4 old Deere’s that he putted around on.

A couple of words that your posts reminded me of were:…the word “hire” which was hire-e and the word “narrow” which was said more like the word “sorry”.

I was reading another post a couple of days ago somewhere that sort of touched on the same subject of how words are said in different parts of the country (and world) and reference was made to grandparents, but from a couple of posts there, I sort of got the impression that they were being made fun of.…..and I was thinking to myself…..God Bless those grandparents….they can say things anyway they want or call things whatever they want…they know what they are talking about. They were decent, hard working people….people that cleared and farmed and made this land the great land it is today….I salute them !

I hope we get a few more posts on this subject here……..as I find it interesting.

Let me make a note here….I don’t have the impression that you are poking fun here like they did in the other posts I mentioned above.
Thanks!

Gary

On the tillage tools you mention, where I grew up in Nova Scotia a row crop cultivator was called just a cultivator. What you refer to as a field cultivator even the newer wheel controled versions were called spring tooth harrows. I first heard the term scuffler and scuffled, when about 20 years of age at an auction in PEI during the month of June. All of the guys in crowd were discussing scuffling their potatoes. Not knowing what they were talking about I kept very quiet trying to figure this out. At first the only item I could think of was my dad and his 1/4 to 1/2 acre potato patch for personal use on dairy farm. He used to drag a 5 foot section of spike tooth harrow over his potato rows just as potatoes were emerging to kill weeds. He always used a horse for this chore. One day while doing this one rein broke and the old horse took off in circles, and by the time dad got him reined in he had made about 6-8 circles around the potato patch. Of course the crossing row effect up rooted potatoes and he had a terrible mess. Figuring his potato crop was a disaster anyhow he hitched the horse to the potato hiller and hilled it all up again. He said that turned out to be one of the best potato crops he had ever grown. When the guys at the auction were talking about scuffling all I could imagion was my dad's experience. If you go into the Maritimes today those machines are all called cultivators either field or row crop. They will call a disk or spike tooth a harrow, but if it has spring teeth it's a cultivator whether field or row crop.

In NS again a wheeled plow without question would be a trailer plow. A disk plow would have been called a headache. When I was a teenager in Nova Scotia most mounted plows would have been called headaches. Many many farms down there went from trailer plows to semi-mounts.

You and I have really just discussed part of eastern Canada. And no, I don't think it really mattered what name the manufacturer put on the implement, geography was what put the name on the machine. But just think what all this is doing for our collective vocabularies. Many many times I have scratched my head wondering what terms of different areas were. In a nutshell it's one room school to world wide web in 50 years.

Harrow (drag): spike toothed field levelers

Disks: spherical curved blades used to cut trash - breakup/smooth clods and prepare seed bed. Came in single, tandem, mounted, wheeled (for transport)and offset. A disk plow used large disk to accomplish what a mold board plow did.

Mid Iowa 1950's terminology. Dick Davis

How about "go-devils" or "go digs", which were also called eli's in our part of the country, or didn't anybody use a lister to plant row crops in your part of the world? (My $0.02 worth. jal-SD)