An old farming scene

[Robert_in_NY]

This sure is a change from the way they do things now.

 

[Thomas]

Pure iron at work. /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[northcreek2624]

Robert,Was life better then?or does it just seem that way?
I live in Lakeview on 18mi. creek,I get over your way weekly when I go to the Reservation to get cheap gas.
Take care....Mike
Ps Also go that way to go to TSC in Dunkirk.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

I THINK that's a GEHL chopper, and it probably has either a Red Seal (Continental) engine or a LeRoi engine. Except for the wagon being an old horse-drawn conversion, that COULD have been me or my Dad on that tractor chopping hay. Chopped hay was real popular in the late forties and early fifties before reliable balers and factory made bale handling equipment was common. My "personal" tractor when I was a kid was a case VAI, which is that same tractor with a straight beam wide front axle. And YES....that was a safer, simpler time; right was right, wrong was wrong, and no scumbag had yet soiled the carpets in the white house.

 

[Robert_in_NY]

Yes it is a Gehl. The First Gehl chopper in 1942. As for chopped hay being popular it is still more popular then baling for large farms. It is all machine work so there is little to no manual labor involved and it is faster then baling. The machines are a little different looking but run off the same concept still. Later.

 

[cowboydoc]

Chopped hay was real popular in the late forties and early fifties before reliable balers and factory made bale handling equipment was common

You mean they really make reliable baling equipment? /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

 

[Anonymous Poster]

I bought my first personal baler in 1961, it was a used IH Model 55W, exactly like the one my dad was running at the time, and I paid 650 bucks for it. That 55W baled me all the way through college, and it was one of those machines where everything seemed to wear out equally so it never had a problem "missing" bales. The knotter worked flawlessly till the day I scrapped the baler. I pulled that 55W with my VAI Case, the world's best baler tractor once you build a super baler-proof hitch for it.****We irrigated the hay, cut the hay, raked the hay, baled the hay, and delivered the hay to our customers, most of which were quarter horse farms. They preferred 2-wire bales so we ran two-wire balers LONG after the industry had gone to three-wire for ease of hauling. Chopped hay had largely dissappeared from the CA farming scene by the late fifties.....and yes, they DO make reliable balers. Sometimes the guy running them isn't so reliable, but there were some real good balers. Our first automatic was a Moline Bale-O-Matic, which was fairly troublesome, but it was pretty old when we got it. The IH balers were very reliable. You could actually COUNT on getting that sweet little four-cylinder engine going and COUNT on getting twenty tons baled in a good long day. later on we had a JD 323 which could bale twenty tons before breakfast!

 

[MJB]

If you look close you can tell that the tractor in the photo is a Case VC, not the much more common VAC, which was related to the VAI you had. You can tell by the exhaust being on the right side of the tractor, and the oddball steering linkage. The VC used a Continental engine and mostly vendor made parts. While it looks almost identical to the VA series tractors, no parts were interchangeable other than the rear wheels. Just thought you might find this interesting.

 

[Anonymous Poster]

YES, MJB....Yes, I find that VERY interesting....I was struggling to reconcile the engine configuration in the photo since it obviously was not the same as my VAI was. My exhaust and intake were on the left and mine was a Case overhead valve engine. Don't you just love history......!!

 

[MJB]

OK, here is some more info... Case only made the V series out of vendor parts for a few years in order to answer the smaller tractors being made by the competition. The Continental engine was a flat head, gasoline only engine that made considerably more power than the overhead valve Case engine used in the VA series. The management decided to build the VA because they wanted more control over the cost of the tractor and because the power of the V series tractors was uncomfortably close to the larger (and more profitable) S series tractors being built at the same time. Also, flat head engines don’t like running on kerosene, and it was Case tradition to offer the option of “low cost fuel” on all of their tractors. It is customary to see V series tractors with a large amount of ballast on the rear wheels since its power output far exceeded its traction capabilities.