Be real careful...you called me LA in MI. I don"t think those MI folks would like me being associated with that fine state. They barely tolerate me in Wi (native Iowan) because most of the years U.of Iowa has beat Wi in bucketball and football like a drum. I wear an Iowa cap in a cafe and the natives get very restless! (But sure is fun.)
Yeah, cross check corn. Cultivating (for the "2nd time") crossways for a farmer who was poor with the stakes at each end of the field when using check wire made for a hard day of turning left and right quickly, especially when he used a 2 row planter.
Then, on the 3rd pass (lay by time) the corn was as tall, or taller, than the clearance under the rear axle so we would take off the cultivator shields, set the shovels and sweeps a little farther away from the row so we didn"t cut off corn roots, put that H in 3rd and take off! Cultivating wide open in a field that had last been cross-cultivated was hard on the tractor front end and my back end. I still remember the sound a tractor front end makes when the tractor is momentarily weightless and hits back down. In 4th the ride could be like hanging onto a rodeo bronk in a bad mood, but you did not get sleepy! Our neighbors F20 would spill water out the radiator like crazy when doing that.
And you are right, my dad had to see rows as straight as an arrow both lengthwise and crosswise. With corn at 6-8" high, it was a series of geometric patterns...very pretty sight.
As you drove around the neighborhood and saw a field that "was not right" the automatic assumption was that that farmer was indeed a poor farmer.
I knew one that liked Blackberry Brandy and his fields showed it, also. But he was a nice guy and was fun to listen to at the grain elevator.
If a farmer wanted to increase his yield, they would sometimes plant "two to a hill" or even "3 to a hill". When I first suggested to dad that we ought to throw away the check wire and "drill" our corn (same thing as today) like some bigger farmers were doing, he looked at me like I had come from the moon. He didn"t say a word....but I"ll never forget that look.
Some WI guys are going to have to say whether they used wire check here, but how would you do that on all the hills and curves?
Sorry for the long post...you get me going with those old days. I still can"t get over power steering, hydraulics and cabs...what will they think of next?
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Today's Featured Article - Identifying Tractor Noises - by Curtis Von Fange. Listening To Your Tractor : Part 3 - In this series we are continuing to learn the fine art of listening to our tractor in hopes of keeping it running longer. One particularly important facet is to hear and identify the particular noises that our
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