flusher
Super Member
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2005
- Messages
- 7,538
- Location
- Sacramento
- Tractor
- Getting old. Sold the ranch. Sold the tractors. Moved back to the city.
JD just announced a 6 series with 250 PTO horsepower and 21,000 lbs of 3 PT lift. Crazy.
Yep, the disc they pull behind those large tractors look like they could disc several acres at a time. I guess they have to be that large, or it would take them a month to disc the fields.
I never knew Arkansas was big in farming till I visited my son there.
My son knows one of the farmers and he farms several thousand acres. I can't imagine having several thousand acres !
Just wonder how they farmed that much land back in the day when a 30-50 hp tractor was considered a large tractor ? lol
I remember in the 1950s that when our family worked doing farm work it was always for a farmer who owned their own land - and it seemed to always be be in the1180 to 360 acre size. Our family would go there or a couple of months at a time and we would stay in a sort of cabin or little shack that was set there as temporary housing for the hired help (that's us). For some farmers we would eat dinner. with the family and others not. But the farmer's wife would see to it that there was breakfast and a sack lunch sandwich in the field.
My guess is that in the early part of the century until the post WWII years a lot of the US population lived on that size family farms which could be farmed with those 30 to 50 hp tractors...but farmers really had to guess right versus the weather. It seemed to me that lots of them were alcoholics.
I'm guessing that as more people moved to town to work for industy the remaining farms joined together and got larger. The first really big 200 HP tractors that I saw were in the mid 1960s in the big grain fields from Western Kansas, Neb, and on to N. Dakota. Eastern Kansas and Oklahoma were still mostly family farms at that time.
rScotty
They didn't farm that much land back in the day here . a huge farm was maybe 500 acres . Back in the early 90's we had 500 acres of peanuts and that was HUGE in those days we did everything with 150hp tractors. WHen older guys died or retired the mega farmers started leasing and to be about to keep up with thousands of acres you had to buy or lease bigger equipment to cover more ground faster. The profit margins were greater in those days also and it did not require as much land to live comfortable. The cost of everything is 3 times what it was but the price for the commodity is the same as it was back then. Its volume only business now
Mj will be grown in warehouses another large scale crop