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.
My grandpa gave me a John Deere No. 5 sickle mower that he used to use on his farm. He spent a lot of hours with it mowing alfalfa with his dad while he was growing up. Since I’ve got the machinery to pull it, I thought it’d be a lot of fun to take it and get it working with my John Deere A or B. I have since gotten it working, and it works very well behind the A! I’ll probably never cut down an entire field with it, but it’s fun to see how it works and see how they used to do it in the “good old days”. For now, it’s job is going to be trim work around the barn area and trimming down the sides of the roads.
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.
With it being so cold this year, I thought I’d compile a small video of clips from various summer activities. It shows a small summary of life in the rural Star Valley Wyoming.