As you know, I travel quite a bit and this past week took me through parts of Northern California. Took a couple of hours and toured the Heidrick Ag Tractor and Hayes Truck Museum in Woodland, CA. Some really neat stuff in those side-by-side museums. A guy named Heidrick farmed 30,000 acres in the Sacramento area and collected lots of early gas/diesel powered farming equipment. Most of the equipment was from 1905 to 1940. Not much Farmall or Deere equipment but lots of Catepillar, Best, Holt, Oil-Pull, Fordson, early IH (Mogul, 10-20?), Fageoli, Yuba, Allis-Chalmers and beaucoup other manufacturers from the that period. From looking at all the hitches, propulsion, transmission and other mechanical aspects seen in this big collection, it appears that not much new under the sun has been developed since the 1930's. That is an exaggeration, of course, but it was truly amazing to see the ingenious developments that were made in the 1905 to 1930 period. If you are a Catepillar man/woman, the Heidrick museum is the place to be.Woodlands is about 15 miles north of Sacramento on Interstate 5. The truck museum is worth the trip by itself. Your traveling museum reporter. They have good bookstore that had titles from our favorite Farmall authors (I bought a book!). For you California folks, how about explaining rice farming to me? Do you raise rice throughout the year or just during certain seasons? It appeared that some fields were recently planted while some others appeared to be half grown to me. Also, there would be small grains fields literally beside rice fields which were beside sunflower fields. Besides field flooding during part of the growing season, is there any other special field preparation for growing rice? How do you fertilize plants whose roots are under water? Inquiring minds want to know! The fellows at the Sacramento Avis counter said all those rice field surrounding the airport sure do grow a lot of mosquitos!!
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