[Farmall] m

Sun Nov 27 11:40:51 PST 2016

Well that was an education! Definitely different that what I grew up 
doing.  I never even thought about solid setting of irrigation, around 
here strawberry growers would be the only ones doing it. I guess the 
eastern part of the state where produce is grown would be a different 
story. Here with tobacco you soaked the heck out of it and then moved 
the sprinklers over to the next section. This is was only done during 
droughts/severe dry spells. You had to keep your entire crop (more or 
less) maturing at the same rate due to the way it is harvested. Newer 
varieties have really changed this practice, but thats how it was done 
for many years.

Eastern part of the state has 4wd tractors with those really narrow 
tires you describe, I imagine for produce farming. One local guy has one 
he uses for spraying soybeans and maybe corn. Corn I can understand the 
narrow wheels but all beans here are drilled (6-8" spacing), so I'm just 
guessing he figures he will drive over less beans with that tractor, or 
could be that's the one with GPS and sprayer controls.

John

On 11/26/2016 1:48 PM, Grant Brians wrote:
> Traditional flood and furrow irrigation worked similarly but different.
> Flood was used on Alfalfa, orchards, and in one area of the central
> valley Corn and Milo. You put up a berm and then flood between berms.
> The berms originally were all done with a check disc - basically a
> tandem disc with the blades set to kick soil into a ridge pulled by
> horses or later a tractor. Then the area in between might or might not
> be disced toward the berm (usually called a check). The water then
> headed down the alley created by the berms.
>        Furrow irrigation was the most common means of irrigation and
> meant using a lister to create beds with furrows. Then the seeds were
> planted either before or after irrigation on the beds.  In furrow
> irrigation, the narrower the furrow, the better control over the water
> and the lower the amount of wasted water. In flood irrigation, you want
> to avoid compacting any more area than needed and depending on the crop,
> the same constraint  of wasted area applies.
>        Single front wheel tractors had two distinct advantages for row
> crop farming whether vegetables, beans, corn, melons, berries, seed
> crops or otherwise - first the steering was extremely precise allowing
> the front mounted cultivating knives and other tools to pass very close
> to the plants for maximum weed control to limit hand work to a minimum.
> Second, compaction of the center furrow also occurred, helping move more
> water into the plant beds.
>        Wide front tractors have the advantage of minimizing the amount of
> area compacted, although in winter usually farmers would use crawlers to
> eliminate compaction and allow entry faster after rain to plant the
> earliest crops. See pictures of IH and Oliver 60" and 80" track
> crawlers, especially the Olivers were very common in the Salinas Valley
> and Southern California vegetable production areas. The only higher
> production IH crawler for the purpose was the Farmall 340 with tracks.
> Oliver had the OC-6 which was an Oliver 77 with steel tracks.
>        Now, with Sprinkler and drip irrigation, the advantages of narrow
> wheels with high clearance like the 3 JD6430's that I have equipped with
> 54" and 46" rear tires or the Oliver and New Hollands with 42" and 46"
> tires really comes to the forefront since no one makes tricycles any
> more. The common wheel widths in the Midwest on these tractors are 16.9"
> or 18.4", but here we are using the metric or inch equivalent of 10.1"
> to 13.6" at the very widest, with 11.2" being quite common on row crop
> vegetables or fruits. There are even 9"x42" wheels on some of the
> cultivating tractors.
>        We use flood irrigation only in our orchard and I have never used
> it for anything else because we do not have canal water like in some
> areas. Furrow irrigation I can do and it is efficient for some crops,
> but I do not have any irrigators other than myself who know how to do it
> correctly and efficiently, so like nearly everyone in our local area we
> do not perform it anymore. More and more drip irrigation is performed
> locally along with its variant of micro sprinklers for orchards. Our
> main irrigation method is sprinkler using aluminum pipe and small impact
> sprinklers. Some of my pipe dates to the 1940's and some is as recent as
> the last several years. Our preferred sprinkler models and manufacturer
> are Weather-Tec heads made in Fresno California as they are more durable
> and are rebuildable unlike the Chinese heads. The Mexican Rain-Birds are
> ok, but they do not hold up as well and actually cost more to buy than
> the California made ones. Briefly when the Chinese cornered the Brass
> market a few years ago the California heads cost more, but they do not
> anymore.
>                    Grant Brians - Hollister,California farmer
> p.s. I don't know the exact number of sprinkler pipes I have, but I have
> accumulated 14 brands and we solid set well over 200 acres (maybe 240?)
> of the 320 acres I farm at a time. I think I might cross post this on
> the ATIS list too....
>         On 11/25/2016 5:26 PM, John Hall wrote:
>> Grant, guess what I was trying to say is that the double front wheel
>> setup is probably the most common across the US. Remember, I'm in NC,
>> not the Midwest. Outside of a few F-12's, I rarely can recall seeing a
>> single wheel setup on anything--It definitely makes it a more desirable
>> collector tractor by being so odd.
>>
>> Regardless of whats most common, how come narrow fronts don't work well
>> for irrigation? I'm thinking you guys have ditches or canal's for
>> irrigation, do you flood the fields or do they cause issues trying to
>> cross ditches? We don't see very much produce farming here. Whatever we
>> do have would be watered the same as tobacco---lots of alum pipe laid
>> out temporarily. Old school method was to have individual guns in the
>> field. 30 years ago that gave way to "rain reels"--huge reel of pipe
>> with a traveling gun. It was a lot faster to setup! I've seen a couple
>> of the big metal overhead traveling irrigation outfits in the eastern
>> part of the state--its very flat there.
>>
>> John
>>
>>> John, I hope that you noted I said that in CALIFORNIA that the dual
>>> center wheels are rare.... I realize that in places where irrigation is
>>> not the norm  that setup was indeed the norm, but it does not work with
>>> irrigation or the hills we have. I actually drove one of those midwest
>>> setup tractors before I ever owned my first tractor (a 1949 Oliver 77
>>> three wheel tricycle that we still use) when I visited my great uncle in
>>> Illinois. The point of my post is to remind all of us that there are
>>> differences between areas in farming and equipment practices.
>>>
>>>          By the way, I too have used the 90 degree turn to load a tricycle
>>> tractor as noted by mr. Puckett. It is a bit odd, but it works and is
>>> actually safe for an experienced operator. We still have and use a
>>> Farmall 240 tricycle, two Oliver 77 tricycles and converted one Oliver
>>> 77 tricycle to factory wide front. The Farmall 100's and the 140 are
>>> wide front of course as they only ever came that way.
>>>
>>>                         Grant Brians - Hollister,California farmer
>>>
>>>                      Grant Brians
>>>
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