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 - An Old-Time Tractor Demonstration - by Kim Pratt. Sam was born in rural Kansas in 1926. His dad was a hard-working farmer and the children worked hard everyday to help ends meet. In the rural area he grew up in, the highlight of the week was Saturday when many people took a break from their work to go to town. It was on one such Saturday in the early 1940's when Sam was 16 years old that he ended up in Dennison, Kansas to watch a demonstration of a new tractor being put on by a local dealer. It was an Allis-Chalmers tractor dealership,
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