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Video of chopping corn in 1960!!! JD 70 diesel do the har...

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That is a neat vid, thanks for sharing,, I always liked the sound of a JD two cylinder dsl at work,, the 9N/2N ect working the pile was doing a decent job too with duals and the person running it,,
cnt
 
Trying to remember what model chopper that was. We had two of them. Had the flat belt ahead of the fan. We bought one in Archbold,the gear box went out,bought another one that sat behind a barn about four miles straight south of here.
 
Interesting to see the "modern" way of dumping in a pile. No one did that around here. everyone had a vertical silo. Even before field choppers. Stationary, long table blowers did the chopping, with whole corn plants hauled to the silo. I don't know if the local weather was the factor for having silos? Maybe the proximity of Papec was a factor?
 
I think that uprights were popular because when you have a cover then you did not have to work in the snow to feed the cows. A lot of farms I heard mentioned did not have front end loaders for quite a while after they were introduced. Even if you did have a front end loader in 1955 you may not have had an enclosure on the tractor. The two closest neighbors back in the 1960's did not have a single heat houser for spreading manure during the winter. Anyhow, a job made a little easier if you did not have all the extras to go with a tractor to dig silage out of a pile. They probably did not have large plastic sheets back in the 40's and 50's to cover a pit silo.
 
As a kid, we had a John Deere G that did our silage cutting. I was too young to realize it at the time, but it probably had a power block and some high-domers. For a "G", that thing was a brute. We didn't drive a truck along side, however. We pulled silage trailers behind our New Holland single-row cutter. Wanna take a guess whose job it was to hook up each trailer?
After a couple of years, we realized that our "G" had enough power to put a double head on our cutter. We had to cut enough silage to feed 60-70 cows for the winter. My dad run the packer-tracker on top of the silage pile. It was a John Deere A with a push blade.
Oh, the fun times we used to have putting up silage. (Sarcasm now off)
 
The tractor and machinery sale is only once a month though now isn't it? Used to be every second and fourth Tuesday,but in the spring it was Monday and Tuesday. Tractors on Monday,machinery on Tuesday.
Yoder and Frey
 
We had a bunker for as long as I could remember. It was poles and treated wood way beck when. Uncle Claud had an Oliver 88 and a Fox one row chopper. He had two false endgate wagons. They'd haul with the Oliver 66 and push and pack with Uncle Earl's Ford 8N. When it got hard to pull the wagons up,they'd hook Uncle Donald's JD A to the front of the 66 and pull it up over. When they got up high enough,they'd set up the AC table blower along the side and blow it up on top.
 
A lot smaller than decades ago when there would be a couple dozen 8N's, 9N's, and Farmall H's and M's a piece at each sale. Blown opportunity to have bought good late 8N's for around 1650 dollars each and then had guys here fight to pay double that price or more on a Saturday morning when everybody checked the classified ads. I saw the trend back 35 years ago but just figured those little gray and red tractors could not keep selling for stupid money. I guess that I was wrong.
 
No bunkers around in the immediate area back in the 1960's and early 1970's when everybody was still milking cows. Pretty much block upright silos. Bunkers did not get to be big here until the late 1980's or so. Guys moving from 50 cows to 150 or 200 cows. A lot of manure still got pitched by hand back in the 1960's.
 
They used to stack those 8Ns up piggyback and send them out of there nine to a load. Same thing with the AC Roto Balers.
 
The last time my brother-in-law's Dad filled his silo to feed a load of cattle, neighbor a mile north supplied his 560, and chopper and couple wagons, My Dad a mile east took the '51 M to run the blower, and neighbor hauled in with his WD-45. And his 630 and 720 stayed in the shed.

The old wive's tale about the old putt-putt's not running smooth enough on pto work was a real thing in our neighborhood. Neighbor We farmed an 80 with bought a 630 Deere about 1965. Never saw a single thing ever hooked to the pto. EVER!
 
Tower silos we?re without question the most popular way to store silage here in Ontario. With a tower, or two towers standing beside the barn. During the cold winter, you only had to climb up and fork it out. Gravity would deliver the silage to the feed cart, or feed bunk below. For a bit extra, you could put in a silo unloader, and save some labor. The feed was almost in the barn, with no snow or ice to contend with. Bunker silos required a good loader tractor, which few farms had, even in the 60?s. Large farms that I remember in the 60?s and 70?s with bunkers, would get a old payloader to dig silage out of their pit. By the late 80?s everyone had a decent 4 wheel drive tractor, tower silos we?re getting worn out, and too small, and too costly to replace. So farmers here started using bunkers, and bags. Very few farmers I know still use tower silos, though I do know two near me that put up new silos in the last few years, and one this year even, $150,000. Price tag. Most towers are either standing empty, or have been taken down, in favour of bunkers.
 
Reading the posts in response to the video, same thing as many said, was how it was here with farms in those days. There sure were a lot of silos abandoned and or not in use, many standing as the last recognizable part of an old farm after all the barns were gone. I can think of a few still around today, just a silo, with nothing else around, both the concrete stave and harvestore (sp?)
types.

Another observation was the fact that front end loaders were still not all that common. I want to ask the question in another post, when did your farm or past farm going back to those days, get a hydraulically operated front end loader ?


My long time neighbor and friend spent his entire life farming, most of it as a dairy man. His only loader for the longest time was on a 620 JD, with manure tines if I recall. It was good at moving rocks out of fields. He was smart with his money, so I imagined necessity was the only thing that changed this for his equipment line up. We had a 2010 JD, with a loader, but that tractor did not stay here but for a couple of years, then no loader was here until I bought an old 850 ford with wagner loader. I don't recall seeing very many loaders at our ford tractor dealership, unless it was an industrial model that we were low bidder on to a municipality, or a backhoe. I know they were around and lots of them were built by the late 60's, and as indispensable they are, there were just not lots of them around, well that I saw.
 
Dad ran a two row gehl chopper (the old flywheel style cutterhead) on his 720. The two cylinder makes it's torque at lower rpm's and when working hard in good corn the rpm drop would cause the chopper to not be able to get the silage over the beaters in the wagon. Next year he had a 4010 and a new Deere 34 chopper. It pulled hard and was traded for a new 38 the next year as well as a new 4020. Tom
 
Dad had a wooden carrier that went up under the axle on the Oliver 66 and sat on the drawbar. He'd fill potato crates with silage,stack them on the carrier and back up to the barn door with them,then carry them in and dump them in the manger.
 
Our first hydraulic loader was a trip bucket on a Farmall H. Would have been mid 60s I guess. Dad had a cable lift that ran with a winch off the PTO on a JD B before that. I think it was around 69 or so that we got an Oliver Super 55 with a trip bucket Freeman loader. That was quite a step up because unlike the H,it had a wide front. It was about 80 or 81 before I finally got a loader with a hydraulic bucket. It was a Freeman on a Ferguson 30. It was way too much loader for that little tractor. I bought a 1020 Deere in December of 81 and put the loader on that. That one was the ultimate for the next 30+ years with power steering and a hydraulic bucket both until I got the FWA Oliver 1365.
 
If the 70 had a wide front end and was blowing the corn into a wagon that could have been us and our next door neighbor in the video. They jointly owned the chopper and a JD blower with a long table and belt driven. Neighbor supplied the 70 on the chopper and Dad supplied a W9 and later a Cockshutt 50 on the blower. I can remember more than one wet fall with the 70 digging through the mud and sometimes stuck. That chopper and a load of silage was a lot of weight behind that tractor. Memories of growing up.
 
Don't think we had silos until about 1960 but had a loader in 1953. New Farmall Super C, had loader, planter, cultivator, Fast hitch mower, 2 btm.plow and a rear blade. Little tractor wore out two loaders.
 
Hauled a load of Fords piggybacked from Archibald back to Central Iowa for a auction. The man running the loader tractor would bring up and position them on the trailer faster than I could put them in gear and throw a chain over the middle of the tractor. The DOT would have a hayday giving tickets for the way they were chained down., Never lost one. Had nine tractors on a 42 ft trailer, the good old days.
 
Dad never had a loader. When he retired, the fellow who farmed the place had a 460 with a loader on it. Spent a lot of time picking rock beside that tractor.
Our silo was a wood stave silo. 2x6 tongue and grove boards and tee posts is the best description I can come up with. Dad built a bunker one year. It was round. He used hay bales to make the sides and a fence to keep it together.
 
We didn't have a loader tractor growing up, Grandpa "borrowed" a JD 40 with trip manure bucket from "Doc" Bartz when we needed to clean the barn/spread manure in the grapes every spring. No power steering and a straight vertical steering wheel did not lend to rapid movements, but it beat the heck out of the alternative (ME). Filling our tiny International ground-driven spreader was best done in tiny chunks anyways, since it would plug easily and slip the tires if large gobs were dumped in.

When Doc passed away, he willed the 40 to Grandpa, the last survivor of the neighborhood equipment-sharing group. Grandpa felt it was his duty to buy the tractor from the widow despite what the will said, and paid what the local auctioneer said was decent value. We used that tractor as is for a few years, then moved the loader (Model 5?) over to our 1010- still no power steering, but a slanted steering wheel and dash shifter made it much more comfortable. I sold the 1010/loader to a neighbor when I got the 2630 with newer 520 loader, leaping into the 1970's technology in the early 2000's. He flushed the radiator and never added antifreeze, and the block cracked the first winter. I saw it sell at his estate auction, never flinched once to buy it back. I still use the 40, mostly to mow ditch banks with a sickle mower.
 
Nice old video ! You can just about smell that fresh cut silage, one of my favorite farm smells. The corn looks pretty green still in the video, that's the way I remember we did it too. When I see them chopping around here now its usually much drier corn, not sure why. We would blow the silage into a stave silo 35 feet high with a belt ran from a Farmall Super H, I can still remember how hard it would work and that belt jumping when a bigger slug would go in. Dad was always worried about plugging the pipe and would try to feed slow enough. If the pipe plugged it was a big headache to clear.
 
Ran Deere 2 cylinder for years and NEVER a think about not running smoth enough for PTO work. Something was wrong with the tractor that needed repair if they had a problem like that. AC dealer complained about that causing breakage problems in the AC combine knowing we had a PTO combine and Deere 2 cylinder tractor. That is untill he realized that the combine that was having the problem had its own AC B engine mounted on the toung. After he got it thru his head it was the AC powered one that was having the problems instead of the one pulled by the JD tractor he never again said a word about Deere being like that.
 
We were still chopping with the 2 bangers into the 80's. Ours was a gasser 720 on the chopper and occasionally a G on the blower. Some folks down the road a ways had 730 diesels they ran. We had one but the crank got bent during spring plowing one year and that was the end of it. Bought the place in 79 it had a 14x40 silo and we filled that and a 12x30 out in the neighbors field. The next year we put up a 20x70 and the G was taken off blower duty. Still ran the 720 on the chopper quite a bit.
 
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