Different Crops

The Depression years brought the AAA programs and some definite changes in farming. One of these programs was the “ever normal granary.” Always the one to take advantage of a money-making endeavor, Uncle Carl proceeded to store corn. The hog house and the chicken house were lined and strengthened to hold corn for storage. Two new single cribs were built alongside the double crib. I don’t know how much income was garnered from this, but I do know that through the years following the Depression, all the remaining Peterson children would receive a check from the farm income each year.

It was Grandfather Peterson’s wish that the farm not be sold as long as Grandmother lived. She received an allowance for her personal expenses and the remained was shared with her children. When the Peterson family estate was settled in 1959 — forty-four years after Grandfather had died — the lawyer was astounded that there had not been a suit for partition of the estate. Knowing Uncle Carl as I did, I doubt that any one of his brothers or sisters dared question his authority as financial manager! Needless to day, the yearly checks were greatly needed by my folks during those years, and also needed by the others of the family as well.

During those years of the AAA programs, there was a trend to plant other crops. Always one to try something new, Uncle Carl planted a variety of crops not common to our area. Several years he raised flax. One year it was popcorn. During the war years he tried to grow sugar cane, but I think it froze and went for cattle feed. He also planted and harvested a number of grass seed crops. These were red clover, sweet clover, and alsike clover. Since these needed bees for pollination, he contracted with the Soder brothers of Stratford, Iowa, to place bee hives on the lower farmstead. They didn’t bother us much (the bees) but occasionally would swarm or seek water at the cattle tank.

At one time he contracted to raise waxy-maize instead of regular corn. This maize was used in the manufacture of food stuffs such as macaroni and noodles. He was also one of the first to grow soybeans which have since become a major crop in the Midwest.

Uncle Carl’s interest, as mentioned before, was not in livestock but in grain crops. During one of the last years of his farming career, he raised a mixture of flax and oats. At the time of the settlement of his estate, this combination was still in the bin. He took them as part of his share of the estate and sold them to a hog farmer. The Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament (Chapter 19:19) states that “you should not sow your field with two kinds of seed.” I doubt that he had an inkling that what he had done was such a statute of the Torah!

Farm Machinery

As you have already surmised, Uncle Carl would try and did perform most everything from being a tractor mechanic, to being a carpenter, to painting, to patching for further use anything from a leaky roof to a machine part. Baling wire was always at hand to keep things tied together. Late in life he decided to paint the house on the farm. His idea of paint was from yesteryear and was a mix of white lead, linseed oil, and bluing. The big problem was that he put too much bluing in the mixture and instead of being white, the house had a bluish tinge. About that time he also climbed up, and with the aid of another elderly gentleman, re-roofed both the house on the farm and the house in town. his tool shed on the farm was a conglomeration of buckets, pails, and boxes filled with every imaginable item. From old, crooked, rusty nails, to obsolete tools, nuts, and bolts. There was no chance that anything was to be thrown away.

One of his endeavors later in life was for Uncle Carl to dig in another outlet tile from the east forty to the nearby dredge ditch. As boys, we helped dig in tile in the lower end of the south forty. But they were only branch lines. Uncle Carl had the expertise to use a tiling leveling instrument and lay out this tile line. He dug it all by hand, up to the road, across the road, and then to the nearby drainage ditch. As I have stated, there were few tasks that he would not try. I recall once helping him in changing the motor assembly from one small Hart Parr to another. There was a near tragedy as the hay rail on the barn tore loose where he had hooked the block and tackle to raise the motor. But all of us boys survived the years that we worked for and with Uncle Carl!

Ever the one to find a way to save money, he purchased a Model A Ford truck from a coal dealer in Fort Dodge. With a modified box, he continued to haul grain to the elevator. In later years, this truck was used to haul cobs to town for burning in the furnace there. Since he owned his own corn sheller, we would spend a full week or so shelling corn. The truck would be loaded with about 100 bushels of corn. He would take off for the elevator and the Strand boys who were present at the time, would haul cobs to the basement of the house on the farm. The Model A truck went with the home eighty when the farm was sold.

The Day the Corn Crib Burned

The burning of the corn crib was the great destructive event on the farm. The day before it burned, we had shelled corn and there was a huge pile of corn husks left piled up. I had taken Marold to Iowa State University for the fall quarter. Uncle Carl had gone to Gowrie with several wagon loads of cobs. My sister Vivian was home with our Mother who was recuperating from surgery.

A strong wind from the south started up a fire in an old husk pile that we thought had been burned out. The first worked back against the wind to the recently piled up husks and thus un turn was close to the crib, and it caught fire. Since the crib was far to the north of the building site, Vivian didn’t realize what was happening until the neighbors saw the blaze. So the crib burned along with the elevator and the old gasoline engine.

I returned from Iowa State and Uncle Carl came out from Gowrie to find quite a mess. There were oats in the overhead bins and they were in a great charred pile on the ground in the midst of the debris. I worked with Uncle Carl to try to salvage some of the oats. It was kind of a hopeless task, but as usual, Uncle Carl’s frugalness made the task essential. I think the salvaged oats, with burnt flavor and water soaked from the fire department, were sold to some hog farmer.

Life is full of events that happen without regard to reason. This was one of them. Later, Uncle Carl built two new single cribs on the foundations of the old crib. I think that they were still there at the time the farm was sold.

Uncle Carl was also one of the first to decide that plowing was bit the best tillage practice. He bought a John Deere Van Brunt field cultivator and tried to use it. This was before the days of stalk cutters and straw shredders, so the trash problem made the use of this machine unsatisfactory. But as we well know, present day chisel plows and V-rippers have pretty much replace the plow on the Iowas farm scene. These tillage tools were an outgrowth of the field cultivator.

Ss time went on, the purchase of new machinery waned, and Uncle Carl continued to farm for many more years with patched up machines that he had originally purchased new. One item of interest was the F-20 tractor that he bought in 1936 and had moved into town in 1959–60, had never had the transmission grease changed in it. Not only did he or we not abuse this tractor, but it was made to last. when it was sold at an auction of his possessions when he went to live in a retirement home in Madrid, the F-20 was still in running order except that it did need a new clutch.

Uncle Carl's Farm Machinery

Which bring me to the subject of Uncle Carl and his farm machinery. Shortly after we arrived on the farm, he purchased on of the first rubber tired tractors in the neighborhood. The thought, of course, was that there would be took much slippage with them versus the older steel lugged wheels. But they proved quite satisfactory.

He purchased one of the first power-lift cultivators which we boys appreciated as we saw the neighbor boys lift the cultivator sections by hand at the end of each set of rows. About 1938 he purchased one of the first small combines in the neighborhood. He took us boys to see various models in the neighborhood, but none pleased him as much as the Case A-6 that he bought. This machine with many of its modifications, was still operating in 1959 as the last crop of soybeans that he raised was harvested. It was a cold snowy day in December of that year. The farm had been sold and his soybean crop was unharvested. I took my combine from where I was farming, and went to the Peterson farm to harvest the beans. Water from the snow got into the main gear case and my machine broke down. So we cranked up his old 1938 combine and combined the last two rows. So ended his farming career.

He was the first during the prewar years to purchase new machines. He became one of the first owners of a plow with throwaway lays. This plow also survived his farming years, although the moldboards were worn clear through in places. This piece of machinery plus the combine, the 1936 F-20 tractor, and other items were pulled into the back lot of the Peterson house in Gowrie for what turned out to be one last attempt at a farming operation. The locala small town newspaper came out with an ad wanting to rent forty acres. Needless to say, no one would rent to a near eighty-year-old man with 25-year-old (and more) machinery.

Uncle Carl was one of the first to own and operate a two-row mounted cornpicker. It is interesting for me to reflect on the fact that after graduating from Iowa State College in 1948, my first job was designing a mounted cornpicker for John Deere. It was my duty during some of my high school years to haul corn from the cornpicker to the corn crib using Birdie and Barney to pull the wagon. This was not an easy task since it was usually late fall before he came home from doing custom work for others to pick his own corn. In 1940, the year of an Armistice Day blizzard,  he had harvested little corn and we “worried through” the drifts at the ends of the field as we tried to harvest the corn after that snow.

The unloading of the corn at the crib was an exercise in patience. The double crib had been built by Uncle Carl some years before, and included a homemade inside elevator. It did not always function well, with the elevator chain periodically coming off the track. Instead of a wagon hoist, the wagon was tipped up using dump logs. It was a miracle that no one was ever hurt in this operation. The elevator was operated with a one-cylinder 6 H.P. engine. The trick was to get it started in the morning and then let the motor run all day. It had a low tension ignition system with breaker points instead of a spark plug. Of all the machines on the farm, I would life to have kept it, as this would have been a relic. It, however, was destroyed when the crib burned in 1947. But that’s another story!

Planting

I find now that I have gotten ahead of the farm seasons and failed to mention the planting seasons. The first crop to be seeded was the oat crop, but before the endgate seeder mounted on a two-wheel cart was used, the oat seed was prepared by use of a fanning mill. This was used to take out unwanted weed seed, foreign material, and light kernels of grain. It was one of our duties to crank the mechanism of the fanning mill. This was a long and tedious job that was eventually taken over by an electric motor. Then, Uncle Carl with the unmatched team of Birdie and Barney, would seed the oats. It was then the duty of one of us boys to disk in the oats with the tractor and old tandem disk with cutaway blades. The tractor duty was a step up from pulling the binder and was quite thrilling on a cool spring day.

The next step was to roll the ground with a cultipacker. The main thing to remember when doing this was not to turn too short so as to tip over the wing sections of this implement. The admonition from Uncle Carl in this regard, was not always heeded and led to a struggle to get it back in alignment again.

Through the years, Uncle Carl had various corn planting ideas. The first years on the farm, he planted two rows at a time with a Moline planter pulled by Birdie and Barney using a check wire. He made a bog jump to a four-row mounted planter sometime in the late ’30s. It was not a blazing success, since the runners kept getting clogged. I spent hours planting in corn by hand where there were vacancies in the planted rows.

The year that I was discharged from the army and before I started back to college, Uncle Carl had rigged up a corn planted underslung under his F-20 Farmall, with the cultivator mounted on the tractor also. The contraption took so much time to invent that it was the last of May before we started planting. We took turns planting and cultivating at the same time, driving from dawn to dusk. I can’t recall what the crop was like, but the apparatus was a forerunner of present day minimum tillage practices.

Threshing

Another of the farm devices that was periodically giving trouble was the pump on the barnyard well. It seemed that every year, Uncle Carl would be called on to repair the well pump. There again, the well pipe and rod were in need of replacement, but not before the failed to operate completely. Added to Uncle Carl’s resume, was the job of plumber as we hoisted the forty-foot extension ladders in a tripod to pull the 100-foot pipe. Yes, the pipe rusted out, the piston rod failed, but it would always be patched. Never replaced!

Probably the main activity of the summer season on the farm in those days was the harvesting of the oat crop. First it was to cut, bind, and shock the oats, and then to thresh them. Uncle Carl was one of the first to purchase a ten-foot power-take-off binder. This was necessitated by the demise of the old Acme binder. One of the first tractor driving jobs that we had was in steering the tractor pulling the binder while Uncle Carl sat on the binder seat. We didn’t always drive straight or turn the corners right, but the oats were cut. Then it was to place the tied oat bundles in shocks. This usually came in some of the hottest days of the summer. There was always an earthen jug wrapper in a wet gunny-sack to quench our thirst. We boys drank from it often, Uncle Carl sparingly.

Then the threshing season began. There were eight to ten farms involved. Uncle Carl was the owner of the threshing rig, a huge 48-inch cylinder Huber threshing machine, and a mammoth Hart Parr tractor. At one time he owned and operated as many as four of these combinations. When we moved to the farm in 1933, there were three remaining, but only one in operating condition. During World War II days, all of them were junked and went into the war effort. There was a lot of steel and cast iron in them.

Each year the procedure to get the threshing rig ready was the same. The threshing machine (or separator) was pulled out of the shed at the lower farmstead. This took some doing since it had sunk into the dirt floor of the shed. The small Hart Parr (a smaller version of the big one) was used for this. The separator was pulled up to the location of the tool shed where various repairs were made. Then it was to go to the cow yard where the big hart Parr had been parked since the last threshing season. Most years it took quite a bit of effort to get it running. There were prime cups to fill with gas to get it started, and as it warmed up, the fuel was shifted to tractor fuel. The cranking mechanism was a five-foot-diameter cast iron flywheel that Uncle Carl would climb upon and use his weight to get it slowly to move. At times we would have to belt the little Hart Parr to the bigger one to get the big one started.

So now the rig was ready and the threshing season began. If good weather prevailed, it would last about two weeks. Uncle Carl was in charge since he owned the rig, and it was done according to his direction. One year my older brother Carl and I hauled bundles. My job was to place the bundles on the hayrack as my brother pitched them up to be placed on the rack. I had specific instructions from Uncle Carl as to how to place the bundles since he was the one who unloaded them at the threshing machine. My brother Carl remembers quite vividly the day on the Peterson farm when going through a gate by the barn, the hayrack tipped over dumping the whole load. That night one of the team of horses, Barney, took off into the neighbor’s cornfield and died from sleeping sickness. It was felt that the reason for the tipped rack was that Barney was indeed quite sick at the time.

My next job on the threshing circuit was to be Uncle Carl’s tractor man. The job was pretty well laid out for me with the usual explicit instructions. Uncle Carl and I were the first on the scene in the morning and the last off in the evening. The instructions included filling grease cups on the separator a very certain way, installing the belts on the separator, pouring fuel from the tank-wagon into the tractor fuel tank, and in general doing “flunky” work. As the threshing day evolved, it was my job to watch and shut down the tractor if things went wrong. The specific instructions were to see that the bundles were going in, tailing belt working, and that the oats and straw were coming out of the machine. More than once I was not alert and Uncle Carl came running back to shut off the rig. Not a word was said!

There were times of repair which were time consuming with fifteen to twenty men and boys standing around waiting. Many times it was to repair belts. One time, the head of one of the two pistons of the tractor broke off necessitating a major tractor overhaul.

I recall several instances that have stuck in my mind. One was at a neighbor’s place who had planted oats on a particularly rich piece of ground. The bundles that the binder had made were quite large and fluffy. Two of the farmers wanted Uncle Carl to take out the dividing board in the feeder. He would not do so. One of them handed Uncle Carl his pitchfork and told him to pitch the bundles. He did it, but not without considerable effort.

Another time was on a Saturday evening. Two of the young men were throwing bundles into the feeder. No doubt it was time to get the job done quickly so they could get home and get ready for dates with their girlfriends. They were overloading the separator and Uncle Carl reprimanded them and stood at the top of the head and made them pitch the bundles in at an extremely slow rate. I’m sure that they did get home for their dates, but Uncle Carl did assert his authority in a “take charge” manner.

I did put all the belts on each morning except for two that operated the straw racks. Uncle Carl wanted them put on a certain way. I could put the, on, but he would chem them and then drop the tighteners. One morning we were blowing the straw into a barn, and he forgot to drop the tighteners. Since we couldn’t see the straw coming out, everything seemed okay. All of a sudden reality set in, and about half of the two bundle loads of straw were packed into the inside of the separator. That time it was not my fault.

The tractor had one belt that ran the governor. The belt, as many of Uncle Carl’s belts, was a little beyond normal usage. My instructions were that if the belt should break, to cut the ignition switch, grab a pliers and wrench, and hold down the valve arms to keep them from operating. This was to keep the tractor from dieseling, and theoretically, flying to pieces until it cooled down. Fortunately, the one time that the belt broke, Uncle Carl was at hand and took care of the situation. I guess I had a picture of the tractor flying to pieces, which seemed impossible, but the idea had been instilled in my mind.

All in all, the threshing season was one of community endeavor. The meals were good, and a certain amount of “horseplay” took place. There were years when the season was long because of rainy weather. One year especially when the bundles were taken out of standing water to be threshed. My one claim to importance was that I was Uncle Carl’s tractor man. I have understood that I followed in the footsteps of Uncle Carl’s brother Milton, who became a Lutheran pastor. He had an earned doctorate in theology, and was a teacher of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul. I did not follow in his footsteps as an adult, but from what I have heard of his discipline in the classroom, I am sure that some of it came from the years that he was under Uncle Carl’s tutelage.

Cows

Although Uncle Carl was not a livestock man, he did acquire a herd of cows for we Strand boys to milk. Our dad had brought a cow with him from the small town (Gowrie) that we lived in. Uncle Carl had one too, a brown Swiss, which soon had a calf, “Susan,” which was raised to be an addition to the small herd. As time passed, two Guernseys, a Shorthorn, and a Holstein were added to the herd. Unconventional as he was, he did believe in diversity When we Strand boys get together in these years, there are many talks of this rather nondescript group of cows. Sanitary conditions for milking were atrocious, and the feed for the cows was meager. Since we had no bull, we soon learned the facts of life as we chased the “bulling cows” to the neighbor’s cow yard for the necessary act.

The winter months with cows around brought a pile of manure (“joy”) heaped up behind the barn. One of the jobs we boys were assigned to was to pitch this into the manure spreader and haul it to the field for spreading. This would have been simple enough except that the spreader was continually breaking down. Not an implement of high priority, Uncle Carl kept patching and fixing it beyond reasonable time, and we had special instructions from him as to how to load the contraption to alleviate any undue strain on its mechanical parts.