Project 2016

[CuttingEdge]

Every year my wife and I pick one big project and then try to complete it. Last year it was the building of our barn, while this year it is turning a 10 acre corn field back into a hay field.

We kind of got shafted, but only because a local dairy farmer went out of business and ended up leaving hundreds of acres in rented farms in useless corn. For a sheep farmer like me, I need more pasture and hay ground so it really left me in the lurch. I got some equipment and implements from our potato days, but it is pretty small stuff.

I always said though, its best to do as much as you can for yourself.

To my amazement with only a 27 hp Kubota and a single bottom plow, it only took me 3 days of plowing to get my field flopped over. Then today using the same Kubota with a homemade rock bucket, I was able to get 9 out of 10 acres of it derockified! I thought that was pretty good.

My plan now is to fell a big hemlock, cut it 24 feet long or so and then drag it behind my dozer to help smooth out the field and compress the soil. I might have to drag it a few times over, but after that it should be ready for seed.

Hopefully I can get a better picture of the field. I asked my wife to take some pictures of me plowing it, but she delayed until I was on the bottom half and so the picture looks as if I am plowing an acre of ground and not 10. 430,000 square feet is A LOT of ground to cover when you are doing it 1 foot at a time with a single bottom plow. (1952 Dearborn plow for those that care about such things).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/133696754 ... es-2y7ad9/

[jtrichard]

Just think it used to be done with a horse

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

Or an ox. One furlong at a time.....

BTW, an ox's speed is measured in Furlongs per Fortnight....

Stan

Edit: actually, you are likely working faster than you would have been with Deere's newest idea in 1947. An 18 HP model M with one bottom on it.

[Paul Buhler]

When in these situations I recall the phrase " How do you eat an Elephant? - One bite at a time." It's amazing how much work can be achieved if one just does it. Congrats on getting your fields converted. Paul

[CuttingEdge]

Well I am not there yet, still a lot more to do. I left the one acre with rocks because I call it Lucifer's Acre...so full of rocks because a few years ago it was a forest with 90 year old trees. I cleared it to make an L-shaped field rectangular. Oh is it full of rocks.

[CuttingEdge]

The old Dearborn plow has some history though. A neighbor wanted to plow up an acre of ground and at the time our old Ford 900 was out of commission with a bad 3 point hitch, and you guys know those old tractors...take away the 3 point hitch on a Ford 900 from the 1950's and you did not have much. So I used a 55 hp 4x4 John Deere from the dairy farm.

Well a rock wedged between the two moldboards and instantly snapped the second beam making my double bottom plow into a single one. The thing is though, it actually plows better; deeper but also tends to root out bigger rocks since there are less points to jam a rock into.

It is hard to believe, but my Grandfather used to plant 400 acres of potatoes every year and used this old plow to do so. That is a lot of plowing. My Great Grandfather, he did the same ground, but used horses and had 17 teams going all the time whether farming or logging. They said he was so busy that he would often stop and instantly fall asleep from exhaustion alone, just trying to keep so many teams going all at once. But he was not a nice man; it has also been said that he was so crooked that he could hide behind a cork screw. He made this farm the size that it is, but he was shady in doing so. That we are NOT proud of.

[Lavoy]

I always liked the looked of a moldboard plowed field, but god it takes forever. Once when I was little, was plowing with a 4020 and 5-16's plow. I was little enough I could kind of lay crosswise on the seat and look at the front wheel in the furrow through one of the cab windows. Needless to say, I fell asleep and it jumped the furrow and took off across the quarter. I woke up and caught it, but that was a lot of rounds having to bump across that furrow I had just made til I got past it.
Lavoy

[CuttingEdge]

I have always liked plowing. I guess it is watching that soil roll off the moldboard endlessly and ending flipped upside down with dirt covering it. There is various thoughts on it now; some are saying it works good at getting rid of compaction versus other methods, while some say its no good. Vertical tillage is all the rage here, but honestly what does that mean? It can mean almost anything from what I am reading.

Here in Maine I KNOW we have to till. I have nothing against no-till is just that our soil is so prone to compaction that we must deal with it. A few years ago the Extension service did a study on no-till, but they never said WHERE they did it. They chose a field right beside a gravel pit and then concluded no-till works in our county. In my opinion they cooked the books just by location alone. I would say in 90% of my field the plowshare was riding on ledge. It's good soil, just not a lot of it.

[oldtanker]

I have a 2-14 Deerborne that I use for our garden. I did plow an 8 acre field with it and a Ford 8N a couple of years ago. Here you can no till but soil compaction after the 2nd year affects yields. For a long time everyone was chisel plowing but mow board plows are making a huge comeback. I have a 5-18 I use behind my big tractor.


Back in the day farmers with smaller tractors would get up before dawn, do chores and hit the field. They would plow till cores and then get back at it till dark. I knew one old guy who plowed about 240 acres a year. It actually took him about 40 days as he averaged about 6 acres a day. He'd plow his oats ground and net tem in then his corn ground then whatever he was planting as a cash crop that year. Fast forward to now. Friend on mine has a 425HP 4930 CaseIH that plays with a 10-18 bottom plow. He can do about 10 acres an hour! With a disk he covers 32 acres an hour. He can get all his tillage done and everything planted on 1500 acres in about 2 weeks by himself. He is in the field an average of 18 hours a day in the spring.

Rick

[oldtanker]

Every year my wife and I pick one big project and then try to complete it. Last year it was the building of our barn, while this year it is turning a 10 acre corn field back into a hay field.

We kind of got shafted, but only because a local dairy farmer went out of business and ended up leaving hundreds of acres in rented farms in useless corn. For a sheep farmer like me, I need more pasture and hay ground so it really left me in the lurch. I got some equipment and implements from our potato days, but it is pretty small stuff.

I always said though, its best to do as much as you can for yourself.

To my amazement with only a 27 hp Kubota and a single bottom plow, it only took me 3 days of plowing to get my field flopped over. Then today using the same Kubota with a homemade rock bucket, I was able to get 9 out of 10 acres of it derockified! I thought that was pretty good.

My plan now is to fell a big hemlock, cut it 24 feet long or so and then drag it behind my dozer to help smooth out the field and compress the soil. I might have to drag it a few times over, but after that it should be ready for seed.

Hopefully I can get a better picture of the field. I asked my wife to take some pictures of me plowing it, but she delayed until I was on the bottom half and so the picture looks as if I am plowing an acre of ground and not 10. 430,000 square feet is A LOT of ground to cover when you are doing it 1 foot at a time with a single bottom plow. (1952 Dearborn plow for those that care about such things).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/133696754 ... es-2y7ad9/

Forgot to add. I have a backhoe. I dig rocks out for my BIL every year. Rocks can be a pain where you sit! I've dug out a couple that were about 5 feet across. One 22 acre field yielded 47 rocks from about 24" up to 5'. Just finished one of his fields this past week. Big one this time was about 7' by 3'.



Rick

[CuttingEdge]

My ex-wife always said I was "born retired", that is I always hung out with people far older than me, but I learned from them too. Not saying I did not make mistakes (hence the ex-in the wife part), but as a young one, but I never got into smoking, drugs or alcohol...and always was frugal.

This is Maine so we know rocks too. I always thought it was funny that the biggest rocks were on the lowest part of the field, but it sort of makes sense when back in the day they were dragging out some big rocks with nothing but oxen. Yeah you HAD to go down hill.

Here we always used a stone boat, and still do. Its made of wood, has two low runners and is heavily planked over. Its VERY low to the ground so you can roll the big rocks on it. Then oxen or a tractor would drag it to the field.

On one such field we could just feel a rock as we went over it...just enough so you had to pick the head of the chopper up when you drew near. It was enough to bug you and I swore I was going to take it out some day, but I knew it was big. My Uncle said it wasn't and that our 3 yard bucket loader could get it out. I saw the rocks that were on the rock wall and if my ancestors (I am a 10th generational farmer here) could get them to the rock wall, and they were the size of a queen sized bed, then this one had to be big if they left it.

It was.

Shaped like Africa, it took a excavator and bulldozer working in tandem to get it out. Here is the kicker though, it had the most beautiful loam underneath it. That was because it was so big, they dug a hole and buried it since they could not move it. Over the centuries frost action had pushed it up enough so we could just feel it as we rolled over it with the chopper.

That field was cleared in 1838 so in 2010 when I got the rock out, it was an accomplishment. We never gave up!

Here is a unique rock picker from yesteryear! Nothing I would want to fuss with though!

http://www.agweb.com/blog/machinery_pet ... the_1800s/

[Lavoy]

Spent a good share of my youth picking rocks. We didn't have any monsters on our land, but dug some out many, many years ago for a neighbor. The biggest one I remember was at least the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. We dug it completely out, but sure was hell to push it up out of the hole. We were using an 82-40 Terex, so all kinds of push, just hard to climb out under load.
There was a rock way North of us that they moved 30 years ago or more. It has to be the size of a dump truck. They pushed it onto a sheet of 1" plate, and skidded it a mile to the guys house for a yard ornament. D8 or D9 pushing, and a couple of large 4 wheel drives pulling. I remember the pics as a kid.
Lavoy

[CuttingEdge]

I bet that was cool to see Lavoy.

I was not there to see this, but at the Christian Camp where my dozer does a lot of charity work (it is there now), they had this old lodge sitting on rocks for a foundation. A decision was made to a basement for the place instead and so they used an old cab-less John Deere tracked loader to scoop the dirt out though I am not sure what model. As they dug out the dirt they shored the building up with beams and posts.

Right in the middle they hit a huge boulder that the little dozer just had no way of pulling out. They dig all around it figuring they would have to get a big dozer in there and pull it out with some sort of cable arrangement. But winter had set in so they abandoned the project for the winter.

They came back that spring and the rock had split perfectly in half allowing the little dozer to scoop it out without trouble.

As I said, this is a Christian Camp for kids so was this the cold latitude with live at working upon the rock, or God's handiwork helping out? It seems to idealistic to believe anything, but the latter, but I'll let the members of JDCrawlers be the judge.

[Stan Disbrow]

Hi,

Up in Hague, NY where my mom and dad retired to, there is a road called Split Rock. Guess how it got that name?

Anyway, my uncle, the one who owned the JD Dealership, owned the land where the split rock sits.

It is 40 feet in diameter and 15 feet high and split right down the very center such there is a walking path.

It was plopped there by a glacier, which is about the only dozer I can think of that could move the fool thing.

Somewhere, I have a pic of his 440icd up against it, ready to try to move it....er....test the operation of the steering clutches, I mean!

Stan

[Paul Buhler]

Fun reading the "Big Rock" stories. I too have dug some big deep holes next to some big rocks and then pushed them in to get them deep enough below grade - then hoped they stayed there.