Coyote Ridge FarmsWelcome To Our Rural Blog

I’m happy to say, we have the small grain planted.  Thursday was dry enough for me to get the wheat and the oats into the ground.  A special thanks goes out to our good neighbors.  I didn’t want to bother Farmer Mike this year, as he, too, is struggling to get the crops in on time… fighting the wet weather.  So, in my effort to be a more independent, newbie farmer, I borrowed a grain drill.  The neighbors hadn’t  touched their grain planter in 10-15 years, so I knew I wasn’t going to compromise their planting schedule, by asking to use it.

The drill was a Canadian made, McCormick, 12′.  It was built in the early 1940′s.  The tractor I used to pull the steel-wheel implement was our very own Farmall ‘H’.  Both pieces of equipment, being over 65-70 yrs old.  Yepper, I’m farming with antiques.

Here I am planting oats

What would have taken my friend, Farmer Mike, 2 hrs to plant, using his more modern 28′ drill and bigger/faster tractor, took me 2 days to do.  Whatever the case, I did it myself.

The field sure seemed big

Heading north

I’m not sure what this set-up cost new, but if you think you can’t afford to start farming your small acreage, you’re probably wrong.  The drill can be purchases for $150-350 and the tractor can be found (in fair condition) for $800-1600.  For us, the H was a freebie.  We simply pulled it out of the woods 4 yrs ago.  After spending a few hours on it, then, we got it running and have been using it ever since.

The drill, back in the day, must have been quite the machine.  It has an acreage counter/meter.

Acreage counter

The dial on right is what I kept my eye on.  I wanted to plant 10 acres of wheat, then 10 acres of oats.  The knobs towards the tops were the reset levers.  When I pushed one upwards, I was able to turn the right dial.  The bottom dial measured 2 acre increments… it’s pointing to the ’2′ now.  It appears the dial on the left was intended to measure total acreage.  Personally, I could not imaging sitting on an H Farmall, pulling this drill for 700-800 acres.  It would take years to do.

The only real odd part of the grain drill was the units of measurement.  I wanted to plant approx. 2½ bushels of oats per acre.  As you can see in the photo below, this Canadian manufactured drill didn’t use bushels as a unit of measure – only pecks & quarts.

Peck and quarts? Really?

It turns out that there are 4 peck to a bushel.  So that was an easy conversion.  With the oats, I was also planting some alfalfa and grass seed – some of it went into the grass-boxes, in front of the drill.  The grass seeder had a similar dial to the one above, except that it measured in quarts.  Alfalfa is sown in lbs/acre.  It turns out there are 1.1 lbs per quart.

When I finished planting my 10 acres of oats/alfalfa/grass mix, I had very little seed remaining.  It turned out perfectly.  Carol then helped me clean the seed boxes so I could bring the drill back to the neighbors in better shape than when I found it.  I sure am grateful for having such good friends and neighbors.

I have a video to post… I’ll find it someday.

No related posts.