An old acquaintance's Memorial Day Weekend story

I was just thinking about a story told to me (more than once) that talks about the trials and tribulations of farming. His grandfather was farming back during the late 1960's and his 5 plow tractor goes down after lunch on Friday needing to plow under manure being applied to a field not quite thirty acres. He makes a few calls and finds that nothing available as a demo or rental to pull the 5 bottom semi-mount plow. While the Oliver 77 with loader and Oliver 880 are busy with the manure chores including cleaning pens the plows for those two tractors are still around but have not been looked at for a bunch of years. The farmer decides that he will resurrect the plows but it will take some doing plus the big tractor operator is none too keen about being around manure. Over a half day is spent chasing a tire, acetylene, hydraulic hose, shares, and the shins did not look too great either along with the actual repair work. Not wanting to chance anything the Olivers are brought up to the garage for oil changes and the loader removed from the 77. Instead of the manure being rolled in by late Friday the Olivers were heading to the field at 6AM just getting started on turning under the manure. The guy who would have plowed Friday had to work at his regular job Saturday.


The field is turned by 1:30 Saturday afternoon but now to disk it. The 15' disk is too big for the 880 especially pulling the packer. The farmer has a few thoughts. The one neighbor has a 10' disk and the farmer has an old Dunham packer that would match but the neighbor would never let the farmer hear the end of it if something were to happend to that disk. The next option would have been to grab the uncle's 8N but that would greatly lengthen the time of the job plus having to find somebody to run one Oliver to pull the packer. He finally settles upon asking the neighbor who could pull the 15 foot disk but insists that he runs the tractor and has to be around his schedule. By about 3PM the neighbor's tractor is lined up to the farmer's disk and a problem is noted. The hose is too short by a couple of feet and the neighbor is fussy about not using "foreign" cylinders with his tractor. The neighbor has the farmer go down to the one dealership after finding somebody still there after the noon time close. The only problem is since the employee was off the clock so late he had tipped himself a few beers. The farmer decides that the best way out so the hoses can get made is to take the employee across the road to the diner so the employee can have a couple cups of coffee and a not so light late lunch. By a little after 5 the hoses are on so now it is waiting on the neighbor to get started. The neighbor does a couple hours work before heading off to dinner at the in-laws.


Sunday dawns and the neighbor works a couple more hours at it before church and once home and having had breakfast finishs at about noon. While the farmer would like to see it dry a pinch more he notices some ominous clouds starting to build at a distance. So he hitches the 880 to the 4 row planter and proceeds to put seed and fertilizer in. Once ready he questions that if with no breakdowns he may finish planting before the rain but there is no guarantee. He still would like to see the ground air out a little more but the conditions make planting possible if not perfect. The farmer heads back to the shed to presumably get its last fill up to finish but as he gets within 100 feet on the shed big drops of rain splatter the 880's hood and fenders and no sooner than the whole rig going under cover the sky opens up with rain. About 4 acres left unplanted.


Tuesday comes and now to do something about the broken down tractor. The farmer calls the dealer and finds it will be nearly a week and a half before the tractor gets looked at. The tractor being only around 5 years old started its stay on the farm off pretty well but the past two years have been one problem after another. The farmer starts thinking that within two weeks he needs to be plowing for 20 acres of sweet corn for the canning factory and another 20 for red beans. The farmer needed a few things at the Oliver dealer and found out that a new 1850 was coming in by the week's end. A couple of days later the farmer signed for the 1850 diesel and decided he wanted a spring reset plow so he traded for a new 546 plow.


Some here might just say that the above was just a fictional story by the college acquaintance and if I had to put money down I would say that it happened as told to me. Anyways, just something I remembered while waiting on the rainy weather to change today and a very late spring for a number of reasons. That I am not the only guy who had plenty of setbacks over a short period of time.

What brand was the break down?

I was not going to say because I did not want to make a certain brand's loyalists upset but now with the question asked I will say that it was an IH. Probably an 806. Nothing wrong with an 806 in my mind as I thought they were quite a good tractor. But there is always that handful out of one hundred tractors whether JD, IH, AC, etc. that turn out to be a lemon.

For anybody that questioned the 8N disking it would have been with a mounted 6' Dearborn. I checked the math on the plowing time and the Ollie's would have to moved like their tails were on fire but possible. Maybe the uncle chipped in a few hours plow time with the 8N. When you are downing beers after a long week of college classes it is possible to overlook a few things.

Can relate to some of this. We had a loyal bunch of JD people that had bad luck. They never would buy from a MM dealer. They were hurt pretty bad when he bailed them out. One case they had lots of hay down and a 60 JD lost its flywheel he loaned them a MM M5 or some such!!!

Yeah, you never know what life is going to throw at you. I think that if the farmer did not have planting that field of corn needing to be done in short order maybe he would have accepted that his tractor needed to go in for repairs and left it at that. On the other hand there are those who always seem to have money for equipment and like something different every few years. I really don't know if the farmer in question had a brand that he preferred. I've had a "main" tractor go down before and it is no fun having to scramble for alternatives.

That sounds like the problem that we had with our G. If the flywheel didn't come loose the hub that drives the clutch on the other end of the crankshaft would come loose.

Sounds like a typical day on the farm to me.

Reminds me of a story told several time to me in my youth by a neighbor. He would always give crap about driving the 4020. Him and his brother started farming after get back from ww2. The dad had a large farm for the time and they were covering over 500 acres at the time. Both boys bought 70 diesels. They were both plowing in the bottoms and a crank broke one of the 70s. So he walked home and went to the deere dealer who told him it would be weeks and keep trying to sell him a new tractor. They made him mad and he drove to IH and bought a super M. Was not long till all of the tractors were red on that farm.