show comin up and need advice

Hope everyone is doin well this evening. Just wanted to put in a plug for our little ole tractor show before Brian in Ohio beats me to the punch. The 35th annual Ohio Valley Antique Machinery show in beautiful Georgetown, Ohio is comin up this week (August 11-14). So if any of you YT folks are in the neighborhood and would like to come on down please feel free to. International Harvestor is the featured tractor so all you red folks come out and make us proud. I"ll be sportin the colors on my Farmall A with it"s mounted Liftall plow.

Now on to the advice. We are in a pickle with the farm right now and it is most likely a situation where I need to just wait it out but I wanted some advice from seasoned farmers and others too. Dad and I put out the hay crop on my grandparents old farm and use mine and grandad"s old equipment to do it. I cut with my farmall A and 7" sickle mower, rake with a massey harris side delivery rake, and bale with a john deere 14t square baler. The first cutting of alfalfa this year was cut by a neighbor just to test a theory on haybines but our troubles started soon after. We had two good evenings to bale what was the most beautiful crop I"d had. Both nights saw machinery breakdowns and rain took that crop of hay. Fast forward to the orchard grass. Rain kept me out of that field early and then the baler issue did later. When I finally got in to cut, our orchard grass was buried under an invasion of a white-flowered weed. We had invested heavily in this field with fertilizer and such. I cut a section out and had my neighbor to bale it for me. It got 400-500 bales off 3 acres but it was mostly sticks thanks to the weeds. I had another field that was small but got took by rain and ruined. Another less important grass field never got cut at all, and the rest of the orchard grass field is still standing uncut too. We have worked on the baler all summer and have put over 500 dollars of new parts into it but to no avail. I cut hay last saturday thinking the baler would be ready as dad thought this week. It was not and dad was too stubborn to ask my neighbor for help again. The result....I have now lost two crops of alfalfa and my second cutting of orchard grass from that 3 acres. It has been rained on twice and the forecast looks like more rain this week. I have three tractors that are in sick bay right now and two good ones that are okay. I am not financially able right now to put all this money into the farm that I need to get different hay equipment. I"m just lookin for a little friendly advice and don"t tell me to quit farmin or I might just reach through the puter screen and yank your ear... lol. Thanks for hearin me out folks. God bless.

--old fashioned farmer

The show's insurance requires that people that show their equipment on the grounds be a member of the club. And surely you can understand how hard it is for a antique club to even GET insurance these days after what happend in Medina Co., Ohio. So, please understand why you are asked to buy a membership. The club is by no means making millions off of it. We just want to make sure that we have a safe show, and are covered in case there is an accident.

I'm sorry if that keeps you away from our show, but look at it from our point of view. Do you know of a better way?