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Nice pics, thanks for sharing. You hit all the wet years too. The late 60's were awful, I was too little to help or really be aware, but I remember mom _always_ running with a tractor & a chain. I mean _always_. The mid 70's we had a JD 45 combine with rice tires on it, falls were nice but I left some _real_ ruts trying to get oats & wheat combined. Used those rice tires a lot in mid summer. The late 70's & early 80's here in Minnesota were awful for mud, got stuck planting, harvesting, plowing, cultivating, whatever. I think the weather 'here' was the biggest push to get a sprayer & not cultivate - you just couldn't! I remember beans one year, harvesting them with the Gleaner F, dad would walk in front of me, drove any direction he walked just to try to get through the field on the high spots. He'd keep walking, I'd smear out & have to back up, try a different angle/direction. Spent a week that way, wonder if I got 40 acres harvested? Never did get 'good', I was harvesting the last field of corn on Thanksgiving day, had to combine from sun-up until about 10am when the ground was froze, when it thawed up I had to get out & get out quick! Then we had an ice storm & it froze hard after that, Thanksgiving I ran the corn & ice through the machine... That spring I planted corn until June 6th, then it rained. Only got 1/2 of my normal acres. Planted on sand, anywhere to get acres, partial fields. Plnted beans until July 3rd when it rained & I parked the planter. Had 20% of my land unplanted, it was all odd shapes - I had put the beans in in any direction, planted like a jigsaw puzzle just to get anything planted. Had a 3-point planter mounted on a 2-point IH 300, drove until the front wheels sunk, picked up & spun around, back the other way again. After cleaning out the disks. Every time. What a miserable year that was. The govt talked about all kinds of expensive programs to get rid of the extra water in all the lakes, rivers, ponds, swamps... Since then we have had very dry years, with short periods of too much rain. So it might not be your minimum tillage. Here no one has stuck a combine in a long time either. And tillage practices haven't changed much - used to be plow it all, now plow all the corn, chisel all the beans. Just the falls have always been quite dry. But boy have we burried planters, as we get SOAKED some springs like this past one! :) The govt keeps talking about shipping water to the Dakota's in wet years, & building dams in dry years to help out the shore-front property owners. Kinda funny. Meanwhile I keep trying to get a crop in & out. --->Paul
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