The farmer I lease to hires a guy with a Claus and a couple semi trucks to fill silo. What used to take a couple weeks is now done in 10-12 hrs. Unreal speed! I would hate to cover the pile in that video. Roll out the plastic then throw stinky, wet and nasty tires. I'm glad we only had 60 head on our dairy growing up.
Yup, its amazing to see how fast the 300 acres across the street disappears when they show up with 2 of the big Claas harvesters and a whole fleet of truck mounted forage boxes! My grandpa who died in '81 would be ... the biggest tractor on our farm at that point was a 72 HP David Brown 1200 (other than the Case 930 that was on permanent silo blower duty)
I remember when we used to use an Allis Chalmers WD45 on the chopper and a Ford N on the blower and another Ford N pulling wagons back and forth to the field. That WD45 was the largest tractor in that entire area. Neighbor's big tractor was a John Deere A.
We were ahead of the "curve". We had a Uni Harvester. It had a grass, corn and grain head. On the power unit you could mount a chopper, picker or combine. For awhile, our biggest tractor was an International 666. We had constant problem with the transmission, so we traded it for a John Deere 4230. The Uni was pretty cool in it's day. Now it's obsolete.
I seem to remember it being easy sometimes and others it was a royal pain. We didn't have a concrete floor in the back of the machine shed so I'm sure settling between uses had something to do with it.
This will sound funny but when I was little (late 80’s early 90’s) my great gramp was still binding corn bringing it down to the silo where the chopper/blower was flat belted to the MD to fill the silo Had the Super H and 230 to help with the binder and wagons. He only had 20 cows maybe and was more of a hobby at that point, but that’s how he’d always done it so why change I guess. Part of the reason I’m an old red iron nut
yes the good old days, when time ment nothing.now its go like hell and get it in. all to do with the weather.now its changing.
No but my grandfather had one with iron wheels. He actually had one of the first tractors in this area.
Not so strange at all. We had a neighbor who continued to use a binder up until into the 60's. Only one other one continued around here that I know of but can't say when that stopped other than the old guy passed on and nobody else wanted to work that hard. They still do some at the old gas tractor association here. Also, at one time, 20 cows was not a hobby! Things started going big during the 60's at the same time the milk plants quit taking milk in cans.
I watched the farmers chop the corn across from my mother's house last year. I was mowing her lawn-takes me about an hour. They started on a 8 acre field of good 7' tall corn with a 6 row self propelled chopper and 2 trucks. They started after I had, and finished before I was done. I am not an expert, but I would guess that was 100-120 tons of silage!
I would say 90 percent of the corn fields here are houses now. Mcmansions or those god awful cluster developments. The remaining farmers co-op harvesters. What was a season long race for the farmer is now done in a week. I'm pretty sure they(harvesters) contract and move north to south with the season, go from one end of the state to the other.
