[AT] here I go again

[Ron Cook]

John,
     There were not many machine sheds in these parts until the early 
sixties.  Barns had been built for the horses when they were the motive 
power, but tractors just would not go in them.  So, they mostly sat 
outside.  We could put one in the alley of the double corn crib when it 
didn't have corn in it, but it had corn in it all winter.  Tractor sat 
in the snow.  Green and orange tractors stayed looking pretty good, but 
red ones really got dull fast.  A little polish got them looking nice 
again for awhile, but it took off some of the already thin paint and 
pretty quick you had a rusty brown Farmall.  We built our first machine 
shed for the tractors in 1959. Open front pole shed.  Still in use, but 
the tractors of today won't fit in it.  The Steiger has never been in a 
shed to this day, except when it is in the shop for some maintenance and 
it is probably a 1975 vintage.  The other tractors generally go inside.  
Most all farms have machinery sheds for practically all their equipment 
anymore.
     Yeah, an off-set little tractor would not get much accomplished in 
the way of packing down ensilage.  It would likely be stuck or laying on 
its side.
     It is rather arid here in the Missouri River bottom land of western 
Iowa.  Corn used to be planted with a lister planter.  That is a bedder 
with planting attachments putting the seed in the furrow in the moist 
ground.  The soil needs to be compacted around the seed to keep it from 
drying out before germination and emergence.  You needed to wait for the 
ground to dry to "just right" after planting to pack the soil around the 
seed.  It could be as close as an hour and a half and up to maybe a day 
after planting.  So, packer wheels on the planting units were not the 
answer.  It needed to be a separate operation.  There were horse drawn 
corn packing implements for that purpose.  By the late forties, the 
horses and anyone that wanted to use them had pretty much disappeared.  
The little tractors like the Cub,  John Deere M, and especially the 
Allis Chalmers B would narrow in to fit the 38 to 40 inch wide row 
spacing and were not too heavy.  You just ran them down the rows and 
"packed the corn".  With a bunch of work you could get a 9 or 2 N Ford 
in that narrow, but you lost one brake pedal in the process.  I never 
saw anyone use an 8 N or newer.  Many used a cut down narrowed in Model 
A Ford car.  Lot of fun and usually a better seat than a tractor, but 
hard to turn around on the ends.  Of course you are only doing two rows 
at a time, so the horse implements were reworked and pulled by the 
little tractors except the Cubs to do four rows at a time. That pretty 
much spelled the end of the cut down Model A's for work so they went to 
transportation to school.  More fun.  No license required as they were a 
tractor, right??  It didn't take but a couple years and we had them all 
used up.

Ron Cook
Salix, IA

On 7/29/2014 9:42 PM, jtchall at nc.rr.com wrote:
> OK here we go with the regional terms again! What in the heck is packing
> corn? If I had to guess it has something to do with a pit silo. But I can't
> see driving anything that light and offset over something like chopped corn.
>
> Seriously, nobody kept their tractors under a shed? You used to see that a
> lot with poorer farmers here in the South, but you don't see it quite as
> much anymore.
>
> John Hall
>
>
>