jworley

It reminds me of South Florida work tractors that show up around here on auction yards.

Put a 7.3 in the Bronco, then you’ll have it all covered. A nice older Bronco like that is getting hard to come by.

There’s 440 acres across the road from my house for sale, for $3800. Good groundwater for irrigation, paved road on two sides and it’ll be a long time before suburbia gets out here. It has a about 130 ish acres in crop land 170ish acres of Bermuda grass pasture 60-80ish acres of Bermuda grass hayfields and the rest is low cutover. However, this area wrote the book on hot and humid. Winter isn’t bad but can get more uncomfortable than you would guess, cold spells don’t last long but summer comes early and doesn’t give up easily. It’s in the dark purple part.

I have a similar problem, that’s the next thing on a very long list. I’m working on running down a fuel leak at the moment.

I’m in the process of getting this thing back road ready. Not a tractor but, it does have an IH engine.

We call hippers “bedders” or a “ripper bedder” because locally they have a ripper shank ahead of the discs. https://www.kelleymfg.com/product/6800-series-ripper-bedder-2/

Here it’s picking cotton or peanuts, pulling corn, cropping tobacco, cutting wheat or soybeans. “Plowing” was cultivating between the rows. “Breaking” or “breaking land” or sometimes “turning” land is done with a “bottom plow” or now it’s usually a switch plow. Diesel doesn’t have a z. A tandem disc harrow is a “harrow”. A black guy that worked for a neighbor used to call articulated tractors a “neckbone”. When I asked why he called them that, his reply was “cause it turn like dis” (while leaning his head side to side repeatedly). Its always interesting noting how many different ways of saying things different ways in different areas all using the same language works in such a way that we can still generally understand each other.

It’s been spring here for six weeks, I saw some 8-10 tall corn yesterday.

There’s a dealer here in South Georgia, they sell a lot of RoGators. There has been a few Challenger track tractors around and an occasional Challenger 1000 series( yellow Fendt). Now there’s a few green Fendts around. I recently saw three new ones sitting under the shelter of someone who has always worn green underwear. JD has pretty much owned the row crop tractor market down here for 20 years. I hear lots of farmers talking about Fendt now. I’m surprised at how many I’ve seen considering there’s only one dealer here among dozens of Deere dealers. I have a neighbor who’s had a 1000 series challenger for several years, he had all green before that for decades.

Those folding heads are strippers, they take the boll, burrs and all. Picker heads are much heavier and just pick the lint.

There’s a bunch of Ticktock videos of them, other than some details on the cab, it looks like an exact copy of a Deere. The guy that posted the videos claims they are about to start exporting them all over the world at a cost of 1/3-1/2 of Deere. Lol

It’s probably 90% baler pickers here now, about 50/50 hauled on module trucks or trailers. Usually the trailers get the ones furthest from the gin because they can haul more. I drive a module truck for the gin sometimes in the fall. The round modules are much more weather resistant too. I found a video from two years ago that claims this is the last new 635 left in the country

I was going off memory and not a historical timeline and had 1987 stuck in my head. After a quick search all I could find for production years for 1844s, they started in 1989. After some more looking, I found a National Cotton Council article that says they were announced in 85.

I saw an old newspaper clipping about the first IH cotton picker sold in Georgia, from a dealership in Fulton County (Atlanta) to a farm “just down the road”. It’s a pretty good drive from Atlanta to a cotton field now.

You can start in the morning as soon as the seed will crack and sometimes can go late into the night depending on the weather. Somebody that can keep his backside in the seat can cover a lot of ground with one, the only time they have to stop is if they run out of wrap during the day. The module riding on the forks can be dropped wherever desired without stopping. The first time I saw one run, my son and I were sitting in the truck watching him for about 45 minutes or an hour, I told him “that thing has picked more acres since we’ve been sitting here than what we used to do all day with a 9930”. Cotton picking never reached the level of mechanization of grain harvest until John Deere released the 7760. My mother’s parents were share croppers, she grew up picking by hand in Dooly County Georgia. Grandma said they all about starved to death when the boll weevil came to Dooly County.