Agricultural Equipment for Kids

If you have been reading Breakfast Bytes for a long time, then you will know that I have an interest in agricultural electronics. For example, see my post Agricultural Electronics from a couple of years ago. Part of the reason for this is that it is an interesting topic. Technology, in the broadest sense, starting with horses and plows, but really with tractors, seed drills, and combine harvesters, agriculture has got so efficient that only about 2% of employment is in agriculture, with a few percent in related industries (such as building those tractors). Of course, you don't have to go back too far to when almost everyone worked in agriculture.

But recently, semiconductor and electronics have been increasingly important as the equipment gets more and more sophisticated. For example, as it says in that post, you regularly read that "farmers use GPS," but actually the level of automation is extraordinary. For example, planting corn with a 24-row planter, the individual seed heads turn off whenever they are over an area that has already been planted. Of course, in a rectangular field, that is not too hard, but fields end up being all sorts of strange shapes so that often there are triangles left at the end of the field.

In my post Jobs: Farmer, I wrote about my own experience working on a farm as a teenager. There were no electronics in those days, so part of the reason for my interest is to see how it has all changed by watching a couple of YouTube channels. As I said in that post:

If you've never been beside one, let alone on one, a combine harvester is huge and insanely noisy. When the guy who drove it needed to check that the ears coming out the back were properly threshed, I'd get to drive it for a minute or two. It was like suddenly being handed the helm of a supertanker. I've never driven a bigger vehicle of any kind.

I have no idea what a combine cost in those days, and it wouldn't mean much today anyway (like my mother telling me that a loaf of bread cost an (old) penny when she was little). But a modern combine costs around a million dollars new. So 15- or 16-year-old me was suddenly driving a million-dollar piece of equipment. The reason I was there at all was that one of my best friends at school was the son of the guy who leased the 450 acres of land and farmed it. The land was actually owned by the Duke of Beaufort whose country seat was Badminton House, (yes the racquet sport is named after the place, but nobody seems to know why since it was developed in colonial India). There is also a famous three-day event (horse stuff) held there every year.

At one level, being young teenagers was "child labor", but driving tractors at 15 was very different from going down the coal mine at the age of 10 or whatever used to happen. In my post Old Slater Mill, RI. Made in England about the first cotton mill in the U.S., I said that all the spinning machinery was run by children. This was before there were schools, so the alternative would have been hoeing weeds or clearing stones from the fields. Plus the mothers and fathers ran the farm, so the surplus labor available for a new mill was the kids. I'm sure those kids felt a bit like me, proud of being given the responsibility to run expensive equipment and going home each night with money in their pockets. Certainly, driving tractors on a farm as a young teenager was a wonderful experience that I still remember to this day.

The thing that brought all this back, and made me write this post, was a couple of YouTube videos I saw recently. A farmer in Minnesota teaching his 13-year-old son to drive the combine (one that literally costs a million dollars since it is a modern one). And he was not just driving it for a couple of minutes like me, but handling the most complex part when you come to the end of one row and need to turn around and start back on the next.

Watch just before 18:00 when he gets out and hands his million-dollar combine to his kid.

"I should just turn you loose?"

"Yup."

See the smiles on both their faces. "It's not a very expensive machine," he jokes as he walks away.

And flying solo since his dad (see the second video) was teaching his 10-year-old daughter to drive the grain cart with a big tractor, for sure several hundred thousand dollars of equipment. If you, like me, have driven farm equipment fifty years ago, the first thing you'll notice is how advanced the controls are today, not to mention how much bigger they are than they were back then. Also, today everything is "fly-by-wire," whereas it used to all be mechanical.

I used to drive the grain cart, too. I'll tell you how it worked in those relatively primitive days. I would take a tractor and hitch it up to a trailer. The combine would be driving around the field. I would drive up alongside and synchronize my speed to that of the combine. The combine has a big auger that empties the tank of wheat (or whatever it was) into the trailer. The key thing is to fill the trailer up from the back since otherwise, the wheat gets too high at the front to even see the back of the trailer from the driving seat on the tractor and so it is next to impossible to avoid some grain going over the back. I would then drive from the field where we were combining back to the farm where the grain drier and storage bins were. The most difficult skill I had to learn was reversing a trailer. If you have never done it, you would intuitively feel that to go left you should turn left, but actually, that doesn't work. You first have to go right to get the trailer on an angle to the tractor, and only then go left and follow it around to the left. So I would reverse into the pit for the drier, empty my trailer load, and then go back to the field for the next one.

The farm in Minnesota is much larger. The grain cart is huge, with tracks rather than wheels, and can measure how much it holds. The combine empties into the grain cart in much the same way as when I was a teenager. Then the grain cart is emptied into big trucks. These either then go back to the farm or go to the ethanol plant. There is a lot of food being turned into ethanol, and many analyses that I've read show that it takes as much energy to make ethanol as you get back when it is in your car. It also, apparently, does nothing for smog, the original motivation. Lots to consider when thinking about sustainability.

New Combine Operator with His Own Vlog Camera - 13 Years Old!

10 and 13-Year-Olds Finish Harvest on Their Own

I bet you'd have loved to drive a combine at 13 or a big tractor at 10. I did both at 15, but then I wasn't the son of a farmer. It was both a responsibility and an experience that I will  never forget,

 

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