[AT] OT I'm getting older are you? (Really OT)

[charliehill]

Dudley,  let me preface my response with some background.  I was born in 
1950 so I missed the old days.  However I was born in relatively poor 
coastal NC.
A BIG tractor was a 2 row 30 HP rig and few farmers had one.  Most farmers 
were still using mules or small 1 row Farmall A's and AC B's, etc. 
Combines were around by then but they were either owned by big landowners 
who had several tennant farmers tending his land or by guys that were purely 
custom operators and maybe had a small farm of their own.  If I remember 
right they got a minimum of  1/5 of the crop to pick it.  If it wasn't a 
good crop they got more.

Small farmers often used a one row picker and put their corn in a crib for 
livestock feed or in some cases broke the corn by hand and put it in the 
crib.  I can remember as a 7 or 8 year old helping break ear corn.  Everyone 
would take a row, break the ears off and throw them into a wagon that moved 
along with us.

My grandfather lived about 120 miles away so I wasn't there too often but he 
was a pretty sucessful farmer for the times.  He had a Super A, and a Super 
C and later on his son bought an M. (all Farmalls).  He raised a lot of 
livestock and he had a large corn crib.  Some of his corn was stored as ear 
corn and he had a fairly large hand crank sheller that he used to shell it 
for feed.  My mother has that sheller now but I haven't gotten her to part 
with it yet.

As far as I know, by that time, early 50's all of the corn that went to the 
elevator went shelled but I might be wrong.  I know the kind of cribs you 
are talking about but I never remember seeing one around here.

Charlie  (sleet and freezing rain this morning)

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <drupert at seanet.com>
To: "Antique tractor email discussion group" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 4:17 AM
Subject: Re: [AT] OT I'm getting older are you? (Really OT)


> ....
>> We still harvested ear corn fairly late. I just saw a new ear corn
>> crib going up last week.
> ...>
>> --
>> Have you hugged your horses today?
>>
>> Francis Robinson
>> aka "farmer"
>> Central Indiana USA
>> robinson46176 at gmail.com
>>
> The above two sentances in Farmers' response of a couple of days ago have
> reminded me of a question/curiosity that I've had for some time so, if I
> ever expect to get some answers, I better ask it.  Question:  How do you
> first remember corn being sold?
>
> We left the farm in Southern Illinois in 1954.  At that time, of course,
> everyone was still harvesting corn with Pickers.  The corn that was wanted
> for feed or for later sale was stored in a Crib.  The corn that was sold
> went to the Elevator on the cob.  The Elevator had a big sheller that
> could handle Wagon/Truck loads as fast as they could be driven in, lifted,
> dumped, driven out and the cycle repeated.  I don't recall ever seeing a
> sheller on, or going to, a farm except for the small hand cranked jobs
> used for making chicken feed.
>
> Now fast forward forty years.  In the early nineties I was making frequent
> trips back to the Midwest.  Across the Northern parts of Illinois and
> Indiana I started noticing that many of the old Cribs were still standing
> but that they were much taller than those in Southern Illinois and they
> had a huge Cupola on top ... what/why were they so different I wondered.
> After pondering this for several years I just happened to strike up a
> conversation with a farmer in Northern Indiana, maybe fifteen miles from
> the Michigan line.  His farm had one of these "tall Cribs."  He told me
> they were far more than the cribs I remembered from the Southern part of
> the state and that they were really more like the Elevator I remembered
> only on a smaller scale.  His Crib/Elevator was built in the late thirties
> from a kit that John Deere sold.  A wagon/truck could be driven down the
> center and the mechanism was there to lift the front end and dump the corn
> into a "Gutter" that then carried the corn to one side of the Aisle where
> an endless vertical roller chain with "Cups" attached carried the corn to
> the top (i.e., up in the Cupola) where a Diverter would direct the corn to
> the Crib on either side.  This farmer said that when he wanted to sell he
> would hire a custom sheller who had a ton and a half truck with a sheller
> and International engine on back.  He said he had been farming since after
> the War and had always sold his corn shelled.
>
> I know this is just trivia but I am curious anyway as to how corn was sold
> - back before we started getting older - to the Elevators in different
> parts of the country.  For those of you whose memory does not stretch back
> to before Corn Heads/Harvesters came along and got well established I am
> sure this is "real" trivia.
>
> Dudley
>
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