Ford 971 Select O Speed

wellmax99

Member
Saw this picture today of an old Ford 971 Select O Speed with a full set of cultivators. bet there are not too many of them around fully dressed for row crop work.

brought back memories of me driving hour after hour plowing corn, tobacco with front cultivators.

later we had rear cultivators, but they were never the same.

with a tractor like this, low gear, good set of cultivators, you could almost hoe and hill up tobacco plants.

wish I still had one for my gardens and truck patches.

all I have come up with is this one cultivator with a set of hillers, you can bar out a row or hill it up, but you can not see your work and drive at the same time, just aim the tractor and hope for the best, it does fair work, but not the same by any stretch.
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Nice one to have, there's a gear for every task or so I've always thought. All the vegetable and similar row crop farms had these around here, well I recall most being McCormick-Deering, IH, Farmall (the red brand if you will). Very popular and many of the farms we had in vegetables were over in nearby sandy areas, easy soils to work. Much has been lost to development. I never recalled seeing a Ford narrow front in our shop, let alone with a full set of cultivators on as shown above. A friend who grew up working a vegetable farm with his family, mostly his dad, still has his Farmall C with a full set of cultivators on or for it, I took a photo this spring, as his dad just passed away. That tractor will always remain on that farm, unless the grandson gets out of it. They don't do much in vegetable crops any more, mostly hay and greenhouse plants seasonally. Its interesting how things have changed, but even with organic crops, you would still think one of these would be very useful at times, yet it appears there is not much by way of a modern equivalent.
 
Billy,

I think one of the best cultivator truck farmer tractors made was the little AC, do not remember its letter designation might have been a G.

you sit right over the row and looks straight down on your work,
but who has one of those,

next would have been the Cub Farmall or super A Farmall, both great cultivator tractors.
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Funny, saw one of those on a trailer some time back and knew exactly what it was, sure looked like it was meant for the job.
 

A nice straight looking Ford 740 with a set of front cultivators sold at auction around a year and a half ago in NE MA. I would have bid if it hadn't gone so high, $3500. It looked decent but I happened to know the tractor. It had come back from the dealer five years earlier along with a bill for $4,000.00 and still had the same problems. It went to NY.
 
I like the 971 Ford pictured there, when I was growing up my Dad had a John Deere 40 tricycle front end with 2 wheels rather than a single wheel and it had the "belly" mounted cultivator frame under it and I really liked working that old set up, I sold that old JD 40 about 26 years ago when I inherited it but still have the old cultivator frame sitting in the woods at my parents home place, need to find somebody that would like to have it..
 

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