The nice sunny day had farmers scrambling to get hay baled before the predicted rain this night. I stopped a John Deere tractor with a large rake in a field and further down the same road, a different type of horse power was pulling a much smaller rake.
Horse Power Raking
As the oats begin to turn to its yellow color, combines will enter fields to harvest the crop although in some fields, a different type of horse power will be used to pull a grain binder instead. The small bundles are often made into stacks in the field to dry before the threshing begins.
Horses Pulling Grain Binder
Watch the oats being harvested with a horse-drawn grain binder.
The crop fields were filled with activity today, now that the snow has finally melted this week. Large tractors were working the soil to prepare it for planting and you could hear the noise from the machinery. But in some fields, the noise coming from working the soil was the jingle of harness chains, plodding hoofs and the huffing from horses instead.
Plowing the Field
Sometimes newer and bigger isn’t always better as the farmers in the area are finding out. The horse drawn plows have been working in the fields for almost a month, but the big ‘horse’ power tractors have been getting stuck quite frequently in the soggy ground. And then there are the bets going on whether the third tractor will get the second stuck tractor out which was trying to pull the first stuck tractor and plow out.
The Old
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