A good friend of mine just began work for a farmer planting potatoes doing the same job I did when I was in the years of my jr/sr high school days. That job is riding the planter.
The person riding the planter back then was working on a two-row machine where you sat in a seat and tended the seed dropping down to the picker bins for each row. In the picker bins was a set of discs with spring-loaded arms on them that had two sharp picks each that stabbed a piece of seed and came around to a spud that tripped the spring arm and dropped the seed piece.
Today’s planters are mostly four-row machines or more, with cups instead of picker arms that drop the seed each time around. The job is still the same: tending the dropping of the seed and helping to load the planter when it is empty of seed and fertilizer.
I used to enjoy those days on the planter as with each trip through the field, you could see just what you had accomplished up to that point. In my opinion, there is nothing that looks as good, clean and uniform as a well planted field with the straight rows and smooth head lands of the field.
I don’t know if it is just me or if it is actually the way I seem to be seeing it in these recently past years. But, has it come down to as much production as possible with little regard to quality? When I was in grade school, a farmer with two hundred acres was a big farmer and most of the farmers who had pickers usually had one hundred acres or less. Either way, you can still see some of the old traits in the farms.
When I see the pictures in Facebook of the farms being planted with grain or potatoes or broccoli, I take a few minutes to sit, ponder and Remember When … and I can almost smell the dust and the fresh seed and hear the picker arms snap as another piece of seed drops.
Those of you who are working the fields this spring and summer, please be extremely careful where you step and where you put your hands and make it as safe a season as possible.
Guy Woodworth of Presque Isle is a 1973 graduate of Presque Isle High School and a four-year Navy veteran. He and his wife Theresa have two grown sons and five grandchildren. He may be contacted at lightning117_1999@yahoo.com.
