I took the opportunity to have some seat time with the Model A and Number 5 mower. There was some tall grass that needed to be cut down as to not be a fire danger once it dries up. The grass was really tall, but the mower and tractor did a good job. Most of the issues were with the operator, as I’m used to using more modern equipment to cut hay with…
The Number 5 Mower was fun to use though, as it used to be my grandfathers mower, on my moms side. My grandpa used to spend a lot of time with it, so my restoring it and using it has a sentimental value to it as well.
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog last. Basically, as far as farming goes, my spring/summer can be summarized as the following.
The first project was the restoration of the 1957 John Deere 420 Utility. I went to Utah and picked up another 420 parts tractor. I was pretty fortunate to stumble across one online for a good price, so I jumped at the opportunity to take it. I brought it home, and used it to fix my current 420 utility. They were both the same year, too, so it worked pretty well.
After that, the crank of my 1959 John Deere 630 was finally fixed. I brought it home too, but then had the 420 project come up, so I spent time getting that done instead. Once I was finished with the 420, I spent some time working on the 630 and was able to get it working as well. The 630 project was completed after spring planting and alfalfa cultivating, which cut into the projects time, but was a priority.
Afterwords, it rained. It rained and it rained. The good thing was, we never had to use the sprinklers for first crop. It did stop raining, and instantly went to very hot/dry temperatures, so I was able to cut the alfalfa with the John Deere 4230 and 945 MoCo (mower conditioner, aka swather). We then waited about 3/4th of a week, then raked the hay. I used the newly restored 420 Utility for most of the raking–and it worked great! It was fun spending some seat time on a machine that I spent so much time with the restoration process.
After the raking came the baling. With all the rain we had, there was a very good high yield of bales. The yield was much higher than last year. I used the JD 4640 and Hesston 4790 3×4 big baler for the baling.
Anyway, that about sums it up. I’ll post some videos here and in future posts. Enjoy.
This year I took the opportunity to have a little fun with planting oats in one of our smaller fields. I used the 1947 John Deere Model A that I recently restored, as well as our old grain drill (aka planter, late 1950s). It may not have been the quickest way to plant the oats, but I, and the dogs, had a lot of fun doing it!
The three videos here show us getting the drill ready and making sure everything on it works. The second video shows the John Deere 4230 disking the field. Last year we used the Model A as well as the John Deere 2010 to plow the field. Since it was plowed last fall, you disk it before you plant it to break up the larger chunks into a more fine powder, so the drill can do accurately seed the crop. The final video shows the actual planting process.
I finally got around to finishing the photo journal 2012. As you may notice, there are many photos of me feeding cattle. That’s because with the days as short as they were, my schedule basically consisted of going to work, coming home and feeding the cows, then getting home just in time for it to get dark.
This is a video of my restored 1947 John Deere A pulling a wagon loaded with 3×3 straw bales (1/2 ton alfalfa sized). Although we have newer and more appropriate tractors for such a task, it is fun to see the A that I worked so hard on over the past year doing some real work. Not to mention that it sounds good too! I can’t begin to describe how much work, time, and effort has gone into getting it where it is now. Even though she isn’t painted nor the most pretty tractor, it is much further ahead then I thought it would be at this point. When I pulled it out from its resting place (where it had been as long as I can remember) a year ago I told myself that I would work on it ‘a little here, and a little there’ and that it would take about ten years to complete. I never would have imagined that I would have it to the point where it is currently at only a year later. The list of things that were wrong with it include a locked-up motor, seized up brakes, rotted rims, missing carburator, no front tires, rotted/leaking water return pipe, rotten/gone mag, rusted valves, completely-filled with debris cooling system (hadn’t had a cap on the radiator in years), and on and on! It also had a mouse nest in one of the cylinders! It had been sitting out for as long as I can remember–so when I brought it home I looked at it and asked myself, “what have I done getting myself into such a project!”. Needless to say, now that it is starting to bear some fruit from my labors, it makes it all worth it. Plus it’s been fun, too!
This is a video of me swathing (windrowing) a small alfalfa field next to my parent’s place. I love seeing old footage and videos on our farm–which not much exists of. So, I try to record this type of stuff because maybe some day someone will find it as interesting as I do.
The video is of a John Deere 4230 pulling a John Deere MoCo 945 pull-type rotary windrower.
To create the video, I used two cameras, my cell phone (located on the top of the barn, doing the time-lapse), and a GoPro mounted onto the tractor and swather. I used three mounts on the swather–one on the back of the cab, one on the front-right of the swather, and one on the back of the swather. I didn’t point the camera down far enough when it was on the back to get anything that was really useful, so I didn’t use much of that video. I tried to show time-lapse and footage that show roughly the same thing. It’s not the greatest video in the world, but I thought it was pretty impressive for a first attempt.
Having spent so much time restoring the John Deere A, I tried to use it for a few little tasks around the farm. Here’s a video of it harrowing a pasture and hauling some half ton alfalfa bales. Also included is a few photos of the restoration process.
Here’s my photo journal for April 2012. Sorry I’m a bit late–with the days getting longer it’s harder to find time to do stuff like this (but easier to find time to take photos). What’s neat about this month is you get to see the change in landscape as the snow leaves and the valley starts to green up.
This is a video I took of the sunset that we had on March 24, 2012. The view is from Weber Lane looking towards Black Mountain and the North East mountains of Star Valley.
Here’s a video that was taken up at the calves. This video is similar to the previous post, except it has more of the calves and shows the tractor stationary.
Our beef cattle calf in the spring, and we feed them during the summer on the range, so our beef is only Alfalfa and grass/range fed (organic).
