On 2007-04-29 21:37:56 -0400, Larry said:

Peter Hendra wrote in
:

As the winters are mild in God's
own we never used silos but stored bailed hay in open sided barns,
grew feed crops for "break feeding" in the winter such as green maize,


I've spread manure across snow behind the tractor when it was -40F on a
COLD winter's morning. We had a canvas tarp on both sides of the old
John Deere's engine compartment so the "cooling" air from the fan behind
the radiator would blow in your face to keep your hands from freezing to
the steering wheel. The tractor I drove was of WW2 vintage when gasoline
was strictly rationed. It ran on kerosene, not gasoline, even though it
had spark plugs. To start it, you built a fire under the carburetter
(Did I still spell that right in Queen's English?) and boiled the
kerosene to vaporize it for consumption before the exhaust manifold was
hot enough to keep it boiling when the engine was hot. Then, you opened
both cylinder petcocks to relieve the pressure so you could rock the big
flywheel back and forth, finally building up enough momentum in the heavy
flywheel to shove it over the TDC of the piston, praying THIS time was a
charm and it would fire! After several tries, she'd come to life making
an awful racket with fire spewing out those petcocks until you got around
to quickly close them and raise the compression back up to ??
5:1??...hee hee. Once started, it would be left running all day until
you were completely done with it and parked it back INSIDE the barn with
the WARM cows to keep it from freezing solid until spring...ready to
start it at 5AM once the milking was almost done.

Ah yes, cold winter mornings. I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin --
didn't have electric milkers so we milked by hand. When it's 30 or 40
below zero, it's really hard to get the fingers working to strip a cow!
And mucked out the milking parlor with pitchforks and shovels . . .
piled the manure on the "manure pile" which was frozen solid until
springtime. (Oh the smell of a Wisconsin farm in the springtime!)

We'd park the tractor (and the cars) on a hill so that we could start
it in the morning by rolling it down the hill and popping the clutch.
The tractor usually started, but the cars didn't, so after Dad started
the tractor we'd be towing the cars down the road with the tractor and
a log chain to start them. I was 38 before I'd buy a car with an
automatic transmission -- how was one to start THAT in the wintertime?
I remember driving the milk to the cheese factory in back of the old
pick-up in those old fashioned cans . . . I was 12 and wasn't allowed
to drive on the highway. But farm kids driving milk to the cheese
factory in the morning was evidently allowed. I never got stopped,
anyway.


If the power went down, we also had a leather belt-driven alternator,
about 8KW, that would run off the old John Deere's outer clutch housing,
which spun the belt (and anything else that caught it) when you engaged
the big clutch lever, even in neutral. When the snow brought the power
lines down, that tractor powered the whole farm for a week, 24 hours a
day pulling on that belt.

We never worried about the power going down because we didn't have
power. We lived on Great-Granddad's farm, and he grew up without
electricity and didn't figure he needed it in his 80s! Didn't believe
in indoor plumbing, either. When GGD died, my folks put in plumbing
and electricity before the next winter, but I was in college by then.


I can still hear that rhythmic John Deere 2-cylinder thumping, 50 years
later....(c;

I'm pushing 62 in January. Just like the rest of the "almost
Altzheimers" patients, I can remember that tractor.....Now, if I could
just remember where the damned truck keys are located....(c;

I'm 51 -- I left the farm the minute I graduated from high school, and
haven't looked back. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!

Ruby
--
Ruby Vee

Focusing on the negative only gives it more power -- Chinese fortune cookie