Everybody remembers their first drive on farm machinery. Mine wasn’t on a tractor. We got our first tractor in 1949, so I guess now you know that I was too young to drive the team.
My most memorable machine was the horse-drawn manure spreader. Dad forked on a full load from a pile in the field that he had drawn out to that field the winter before with the horse-drawn manure sleigh and forked it off the sleigh onto a neat (huge to me) rectangular manure pile as high as the team and much longer than the team and sleigh. Although the little manure spreader was not large, it sure looked big to me.
The little spreader had all steel wheels, galvanized metal sides, and an apron on the floor that moved the manure to the beaters. It had a large bottom beater and a smaller top beater above that, and my seat was on a plank across the front of the spreader box just below Dad’s so I could hang onto Dad.
When the spreader was engaged with a leaver beside the seat that Dad sat on (just behind the team of black percherons), the beaters would tear the manure apart and throw it onto the widespread just behind the other two beaters. The widespread turned quickly enough at horse speed to throw manure as high as your head and in a path about 10 feet wide. This was a marvelous invention which replaced Dad throwing manure off the sleigh or wagon with a fork to spread it on the field. Mom warned Dad to make sure that I didn’t fall off or get into those beaters, but I sure hung on tight!
The next year our farm bought its first “real” tractor to replace the auto-trac Dad had made from an old chev car with steel wheels on the back. Dad had ordered a Cockshutt 70, but just after WWII, tractors were very hard to get and a little 2N Fordson came in first with no sign of the “70” coming until fall.
Dad made a new short tractor tongue (to replace the long horse tongue) for the spreader, so the little 2N replaced the team next year. Dad still forked the load of manure on by hand until the year after when the 2N was replaced with a TEA20 Ferguson tractor which came with a little front-end loader to load the manure. This was pure magic on our farm. That was when I decided horses were nice, but they had to be fed and watered and manure cleaned every day but that when the key was turned off on the tractor, you didn’t have to feed, water, or clean after it.
When tractors came to the farms, social times also changed.When horses got tired working hard in the field, farmers would stop at the line fence to give them a rest and talk to the neighbor who did the same. A lot of small problems could be solved at that little break while leaning on a fence. Mental fatigue also got released by just having a little chat at the fence with a neighbour who maybe was also having a little tough time. But tractors didn’t get tired and that little social time while the horses got a rest didn’t happen anymore.
Farmers today need more time relaxing and talking at the fence. Most people today need to take more little breaks talking over the fence or just chatting about anything to relieve stress. We had a few teachers who would break up a boring class by stopping halfway through the class to tell a funny little story. That teacher’s class always got higher marks than others where your head was supposed to be down in the grind from bell to bell. I can still, after 60 years, remember some of those little stories, but cannot recite a poem that we were grilled on in English lit class.
I talked to a couple on the weekend who both had high pressure jobs as negotiators for solving labour disputes. They had spent several weekends with their camper parked under the stars in the vineyard where there was no stress and their brains could relax with a little music. Another young couple arrived on two Harley-Davidsons and slept in a tent under the stars where they could hear the coyotes howl, just to get out of the grind for a few hours without smog and no sound.
On the farms now we have bigger, air conditioned, GPS controlled, very expensive, bank-financed tractors, combines, sprayers, choppers, etc. and when their computer shuts down in the middle of any time-sensitive job, stress increases instead of getting a break. Farmers don’t know whether a mechanic can just plug in a diagnostic computer and reset the one on the machine that is dead, or maybe it will take thousands of dollars and days to get it running again. A delay of just a few days in planting, haying, or harvest can cost a farmer thousands of dollars in lost quality and or yield. No wonder that most farmers have a friendly dog for stress counselling.
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
