Some of these inventions I can remember, but dad and grandpa had memories too.
When the train tracks came to Pontiac County, they passed through the back of our farm. Grandpa’s uncle, Ermine Brownlee, had already led the first purebred Holstein to Shawville (Clarendon) from the Aylmer fair a few years before that. She had won grand champion at Aylmer fair (before the Ottawa fair started), and it took Ermine two days to walk her to Shawville, with a sleepover in Quyon on the way. The Pontiac Pacific Junction (PPJ) of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had carried animals to
Montreal market and fresh picked raspberries from our farm to the Ottawa market, as well as relatives up from the city to visit us. It also brought many students from as far west as Waltham to the high school in Shawville. The train also brought cream from farms west of town to the creamery where is was made into butter.
Grandpa Brownlee told me many times that the hay-loader was the best invention ever to come to the farm. Before the hay-loader, all hay had to be thrown by hand with pitch forks onto horse-pulled wagons. Dairy farmers who wanted high protein hay, planted both clover (alsike and red) and alfalfa, and both were very hard to dry. That wet and heavy hay was piled on tripods that looked like a tee-pees made of small poles about six feet long. This was hard, tedious work that all men hated. When that high protein hay was dry, it was forked onto the wagon and stored in a special place in the barn loft and saved for the best milk cows. Once the hay-loader came to the farm, horse-drawn dump rakes were used to move the hay, that had been cut with a five-foot cut horse drawn mower, into windrows that the hay-loader could pick up and load onto the wagon. I can remember when dad bought a new tractor-pulled side rake and set it up himself to replace the horse-pulled dump rake. Dad said that once you baled a field of hay that you raked yourself, you became a much better rake driver. For a couple years after, grandpa used to go over the hayfield again with the dump rake after the hay was loaded to rake up any little bits of hay missed by that new rake.
Our farm’s first experience with a hay baler was when we hired a neighbour with a New Holland 77 baler to bale a field at a rented farm, so we didn’t have to draw loose hay four miles to get it home. After we handled those eighty-pound bales from that NH 77 all day, dad decided that when we bought a baler, it would make lighter bales. After using several small balers and piling the bales by hand on wagons, we decided to get a baler with a bale thrower to throw the bales directly into a basket hay rack.
We always loaded hay wagons in the dry part of the day when it was hot, but dad got the wagons unloaded and put up the elevator into the loft in the morning before it got hot. Everyone who ever moved hay into a hot loft would appreciate that.
Back in 1950, taking off five acres of hay with horses was a big day, and that was after two or three days of drying in the field. Today, farmers can easily cut and take off one hundred acres of haylage and store it in a bunk silo in one day, without any rain. Yes, it costs thousands of dollars more to cut with a large disk bine, merge 50 feet of hay into a windrow, harvest it with a large chopper, truck it to the silo, spread it with a payloader, and pack it with a huge tractor to squeeze the air out and avoid spoilage because of too much air; but it also allows the farmer to make 20 per cent protein feed which grandpa very seldom could.
Dad made his first tractor out of a ‘28 Chev car cut off behind the front seat, and he added an “auto-trac” conversion kit from Cliff Cone to put three-foot-high steel wheels on the back. He converted a two-furrow horse-drawn “sulky plow” into a pull-type plow to pull behind the auto-trac. We bought our first real tractor after World War II. Dad had ordered a Cockshut 70, but after the war lots of farmers wanted a tractor and the waiting list was long, so when a little Fordson 2N came in to H.I. Hobbs, dad decided to take it rather than wait for who knew how long. Dad died in 1967 and never got to sit on a tractor with a cab.
Indoor plumbing was a luxury compared to a “thunder mug” for night emergencies and an outhouse for the big jobs. Dad installed indoor plumbing before marrying mom in 1946. That included building a cement water cistern in the basement and installing eaves troughing on the house to supply water for the cistern. A tank was also installed on the second floor where water was pumped up by hand from the basement cistern. That supplied water for the toilet.
Electricity came out past our home in 1949, and that was when we installed electric power in the house and the old barn below the old #8 highway that ran beside the house. A priority was to install a water pump to supply the barn. An electric milker was also a priority. For 30 years, grandpa and grandma milked 20 cows by hand, bottled the milk and grandpa delivered it in town with a horse and milk wagon (milk sleigh in winter). We had three dug wells but only the well in the cow barn had an electric pump. Grampa built a new “loose-housing” barn with the first milking parlor in Quebec in 1950.
We dug another well 36 feet deep between the new barn and the house. A new water pump was installed in the basement of the house and water was also piped to the new barn for watering cows, supplying the new milk cooler, and washing the milking parlor. Grandma was sure happy to get running water in the house, no longer having to bring it in from a hand-pump at the well fifty feet from the house. A big year for mom and grandma when a new refrigerator, electric stove, and electric hot water heater arrived in 1950. Before Kleenex was common, men always carried a polka-dot handkerchief in their hip pocket (cowboys tied them around their necks).
There will be more memories of “new” inventions on the farm next week.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
