Just a look back in my own farm diary of 1962 reveals how
farming had just started to recover after the war time restrictions. Machinery inventions
and innovations had helped with the shortage of man power, seeing a revolutionary
turning point in farming.
In January 1962 we were threshing shoffs of corn out of the
stackyard that had been bindered at harvest time (August 1961) just the same as
it had been done for almost fifty or more years before that. Then in September
1962 we had a combine in to harvest the wheat and oats, the grain of which was
bagged and the sacks slide off the combine onto the ground for carting before
it rained.
And until the sacks had been
cleared you could not bale the straw.
It was around this time that AI (Artificial Insemination)
was just getting established by the then MMB (Milk Marketing Board) . And we
had started weekly milk recording to find which were the more productive cows to
breed the next generation of heifer calves from.
Every herd back then had their share of cows with long
pendulous udders, often with their front teats pointing east west so to speak, not
very compatible with the milking machine.
And every herd had its share of cows with bad feet, curled
up hooves, all these traits were gradually improved over the next twenty years
with the use of AI. Up till then everyone had there own bull, kept off what was
judged to their best cow, but all too often the best milker often had one of
the above “faults” and of coarse when that bulls young stock eventually came in
to their second lactation some six year after your decision to breed from that
bull, the truth suddenly come to the surface and you have a quarter of the herd
with bad feet or ugly udders. All that change as proven bulls became available
through AI.
I had an allocation of sugar beet to grow for 1963, and this
was before the beet harvesters had been anything other than experimental,
though we did have a lifter that eased under the root to loosen the tap root, to
ease heavy back breaking work. The main reason for growing beet then was that
the tops of the beet would be used to feed to the cows, instead of kale and we
would have an allocation of sugar beet pulp back from the beet factory, and a
cash crop of sugar beet to sell to the factory.
It was also around that time that the cow cubicles had been
invented, the cow men could not believe that a cow would stay and lay down in a
stall without being tied up.
The only alternative to stall housing was deep straw bedded.
And of coarse with the loose housing came the milking parlour, which up to then
had been abreast parlours, now came in the herring bone parlours.
Tractors suddenly it seems, had live power take off’s (PTO)
and live hydraulics’, up to this point when you dipped the clutch on the
tractor, the baler stopped as well, and when loading muck or buck raking
you could not lift with the clutch depressed.
Father’s
Tractor
Father
had a Standard Fordson, all painted in dark green,
It
came with iron wheels, and was quite a powerful machine,
Doing
the work that four old horse, took all day to do,
Up
and down the furrows and it never lost a shoe.
When fathers horses
finally went, he then had tractors two,
It
was a David Brown, all new and painted bright red all through,
It
had hydraulics and P. T. O., so modern it wasn’t true,
Never
missed the poor old horses, walking miles that did accrue.
Countryman (Owd Fred)
Invention is the mother of necessity.
Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929)
