farming with antique farmall tractors!

hi I'm Pete and welcome to just a few acres farm to start off this video I want to say thank you all our channel reached ten thousand subscribers and we're so grateful for all of your support I'm going to take this video to talk about how tractors and equipment function on a small farm using our small farm as an example now we're not a typical example because I started collecting old farm all tractors which were made by the International Harvester company about 10 years before we started farming and I loved collecting them and restoring them so we have a lot more tractors than we need I think that fixing up old tractors makes sense for a small farm because it's a limited investment and so you have a quicker payback but I understand it's not for everybody if you're not mechanically inclined new equipment may be the way to go for you but I'll show you what we've got and you can make up your own mind along with talking about a lot of the fascinating agricultural history behind this equipment I don't spend much time in a tractor seat our small farm is almost all handwork and there's a lot of small farms around us that don't even have a tractor and get along just fine we use tractors for three main jobs here the first and overwhelmingly the most common is pulling wagons around pulling chickens around pulling firewood around you there's a million jobs that involve pulling a wagon number two is we use tractors for making hay and that's basically three months out of the year that we have a specialized line of equipment just for making hay the third job is moving manure and hay around these big bales behind me need a tractor to move them to put them in place to feed the cows and we need a loader tractor to clean out the winter bedding packs for the cattle and the pigs this little tractor gets used every day for pulling wagons use more than any other tractor that we have by far it's a 1953 super C and it's about 20 horsepower it's really easy to get on and off of because it's low and despite being almost 70 years old it starts right up every time one of the cool things about this tractor is it has a two-point hitch the International called a fast hitch and to point just means there's two connection points here if I pull these up like this this drawbar will come right off and then I can hook up other implements using this two-point system and there's a great story behind this because when this tractor was made a lot of tractor manufacturers were going to three point hitches there's a fascinating history behind the three-point hitch in the 1920s a man named Harry Ferguson that lived in Scotland developed a three-point hitch system and the idea was that instead of just towing an implement with you know this point on a drawbar the three-point hitch had an automatic draft control and this was especially good for plowing because what the draft control did is when you were plowing it adjusted the plow depth based on soil conditions and it made plowing a whole lot easier which is something people did a lot in the 30s now when ferguson patented his system he teamed up with henry ford to come out with the first mass-produced three-point hitch tractor and that was a ford 9n in the 1930s it took off like wildfire because it made things so much easier International Harvester was a stick in the mud so later on when other tractor manufacturers including John Deere and allis-chalmers started leasing the patents to the three-point hitch to put on their own tractors International held out instead developing their own two-point hitch system which worked great but the problem was you could only use international implements with that so if you had an old three-point plow that you'd had from a previous tractor you couldn't hook it up to this two-point system so that was the drawback of it we don't use a lot of three-point hitch implements on the farm we have a posthole digger and we have a brush hog that our three-point everything else we just use the drawbar fire but the handy thing about this drawbar over our other older tractors is that you can lower it and raise it so if you have a wagon that doesn't have a tongue jack on it you can lower it down see that chicken wagon right there lower it down hook up the wagon raise it up and away you go I bought this tractor from a neighbor for twenty five hundred bucks and I had to be about ten years ago and I bought it with two bottom fast hitch plow and a sickle bar mower that was also two-point hitch it's been a great tractor I like it and it's working close I haven't restored it repainted it but I have gone through and replaced the bearings in the engine I've rewired it and done miscellaneous little things to keep it running well it starts every time as I said incredibly reliable and very little investment in it [Music] this is a tractor that gets used next most often on our farm it's a 1964 farm all 5:04 and until about three years ago it was our biggest tractor and did all the hang work since we bought the larger 656 this tractors been relegated to loader duty we put on a Ford loader on it and we use it to move manure and hay around the farm a loader is so handy to have on the farm this tractor is miles ahead of the super C in terms of what you can do with it it's got a four cylinder gas engine it's about 45 horsepower and it has live hydraulics and PTO which means when I pull these hydraulic levers I can have the clutch depressed and the tractor stop than the hydraulic still work same with the PTO or power take-off here this was a big advance because before that whenever you were working the tractor and you pushed a clutch and you would lose the availability of all those functions and he had to put the tractor in neutral and let the clutch out for them to work again now continuing my story of the three-point hitch this is the first American designed three-point hitch to go on a tractor so International Harvester held out on buying the patents for the three-point hitch from Ferguson for many years and what happened in the early 60s is they reverse engineered their own three-point hitch system so this box here under the seat contains the automatic draft control and this linkage for the top link feeds into this box and controls implement depth automatically just like Ferguson's system did only in a completely different way when you get into the guts of this box now this tractor was a complete basket case when I bought it it barely ran the wheels in the front pointed to different directions and I had to put a lot of work into it I bought the tractor for about three grand which was probably too much but I liked the tractor and old tractors aren't always about dollars in the sense as far as why you want to buy them and the engine was clapped out I had to rebuild the engine I had to redo the steering system with the help of my dad it's all new in front as far as tire rods it's got four new tires on it which is a big cost for a tractor I went through all the seals I went through the hydraulics so it's a reliable tractor now it's a little too small for loader duty I think I would like to get another 656 and put that on loader duty and relegate this one more tough pulling hay rakes and pulling wagons around next up is our largest tractor and it's used for baling hay and cutting hay it is an international 656 made in 1973 it's a diesel tractor and Diesel's from this era are a little bit different to start than gas engines you don't just turn the key and push the starter button for this tractor you've got to throttle it up turn the ignition on and then warm up the glow plugs the glow plugs are little plugs in each cylinder and they glow red-hot and heat the cylinder up enough for a diesel combustion to start so we wait a few seconds to warm up the glow plugs and there's a little meter here that tells how well they're working and then we try and starter now the unique thing about this tractor is it was the first large hydrostatic tractor international developed hydrostatics and build them as the perfect tractor for things like making hay which is what we use is tractor four and it works just like a lot of lawn mowers do it except instead of a foot pedal that you push down it's got this lever on the side and to go forward you just push the lever forward and to go back you just push the lever back really great for a hang to adjust track the speed to the conditions you're encountering I bought this tractor to consignment auction and when I bought it it had serious problems I knew its provenance it had spent its life on a sawmill not too far from here powering the sawmill from its power take-off so I knew the transmission didn't have a lot of wear on it the gas engine and it was clapped out when I bought it it had a knock in it I took it apart and found out that I had a loose valve see and also the timing gears in the front of the engine were worn and one of them was missing a few teeth so I rebuilt the gas engine and I had more money into that than I would like to admit it got the whole nine yards new sleeves new Pistons all new bearings through the engine new valves I had the head checked and redone everything and it had a great running gas engine in it but the second year after I bought it I decided that the gas engine used too much fuel it was going through more than a tank a day doing hey so I found a junker 6 56 which I'll show you that had a good decent lunge in in it and I swapped the diesel from that 656 into this engine rebuilt the injection pump on the diesel and it runs fine now it just smokes a little bit I'll probably get more life out of it than I'll ever need before it really needs a rebuild in addition to the engine work I did a lot of other things to this tractor I completely rewired it I went through the hydraulic valves and replaced the seals and them so they quit leaking I replaced a lot of other seals on the tractor trying to get it to stop leaking old tractors are like babies they tend to leak everywhere and it's hard to catch them and fix them sometimes this tractor has a certified roll bar on it and a canopy that I built out of wood which I don't especially like the looks of but it gives me some much-needed shade when I'm doing hey this winter I would like to buy a factory reproduction canopy for it and put that on as well as take the tractor apart and paint it and make it look like new again regarding that gas engine that I put all the money into here it sits on a trailer in the barn I closed up all the openings poured some oil on the cylinders through the spark plug holes and it sits here waiting for me to find a junker 656 to put it in and make into my new loader tractor now aside from the tractors we use most here on the farm we have a whole slew of other ones that I drag out to do this or that with and I'm going to show them to you quickly I'd love to spend a lot of time talking about each of them but that make for an awful long video this is a farm ol cup from the 50s I believe I got it really cheap from an owner who wanted it to go to a good home it had been in his family since it was brand new smallest tractor that international made besides its lawn mowers and I got it with a whole set of implements plows discs cultivators sickle bar mower it was a really nice package it's set up right now and it needs to be gone through it's waiting for that here this is a trusty little tractor that has power that's deceiving for its size this is 1947 or 48 super a I went all the way through this - this was a junker when I bought it right now its relegated to snow plow duty in the wintertime but we used to get on it and use it to pull rake when we were doing hey the cool thing about this tractor is the engines offset so when you're driving it you can see straight down at what you're doing it was a super cultivating track you can see right where the cultivators are tracking in relation to the plants that you're cultivating between this is a 1940 farm LH you've seen this at work on the farm - I went through this completely every nut and bolt has been out the engines been rebuilt transmissions been gone through I love driving this tractor they don't make them like this anymore that's true and I use it for raking hay and pulling wagons around it turns on a dime with this tricycle front end stuck back here in the corner we've got a farm all MD we use this tractor to farm when I was kid it starts on gasoline but then switches over to diesel really unique system it hasn't run in about ten years this is another one that's waiting for some tender loving care this is a 1924 McCormick Deering 1020 it's the oldest tractor we have on the farm I did a video last winter on getting it running that you can look up reliable old tractor but drives like tank this is a 1939 Farmall f20 one of the first tractors it revolutionized agriculture with its frame type its high operator station its visibility out front and it's the tricycle front end so it could turn on a dime while cultivating I went all the way through this tractor this was a junkyard special and I bought it had run in decades it was seized up it's all new now engine went all the way through it every single piece and it runs great Armstrong special starter system now that's a little bit dangerous I don't do that every day one of the great things about this tractor is there's a cable on the front that comes from the steering column and when you turn sharp enough it engages the brake on that side stop that wheel the tractor turns on itself that is awesome to drive so that's our tractor family I have shown you most but not all of our tractors we have a bunch that are sitting in the weeds here and they're either spare parts for tractors or just a waiting restoration I want to talk a little bit about buying use tractors now as I've shown you through this video I buy most of the tractors that I have at auction and auctions are buyer beware territory unless you know the rules of the game for the auction don't bid and unless you know about the equipment you're bidding on don't bid and you have to have some mechanical knowledge to assess what's being brought up at auction there's no warranties at auction you raise your hand at the price that's given and it's yours there's no giving it back if you're less mechanically inclined there are safer ways to buy old equipment you can buy directly from the owner instead of the third party auction service and that way you can get to know some history about the equipment and know possibly some of its potential problems get a good idea of what the owner used it for even further on the on the sort of safety spectrum is buying directly from a dealer on the back lot of most tractor dealers they'll have old tractors that have been traded in for newer ones and sometimes the dealer will provide a warranty for those tractors after checking them out so that's the safest bet the problem is you're going to buy or you're gonna pay the most money from the dealer because of that insurance they're providing I the old tractors as I said like a part of the family and sometimes money's trumped by feelings and that's okay the world isn't always dictated by what's economically best it has to make you happy as well so we do things like make our own hay even though we're a small farm because I love making hay and I view it as a part of farming and we use old equipment to do that and it's a great part about our life we I don't have to justify that to anybody except for myself I hope you've enjoyed my tour I hope you've given you some idea of what you might need on your small farm and thanks for joining me and I will see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 245,444

Keywords: small livestock farm, small farm life, farming, farm, homestead, just a few acres farm, international 656, farmall 656, international 656 diesel hydro tractor, farmall 504, farmall H, farmall super A, farmall super C, mccormick deering 10-20, farmall MD, farmall cub, farming with antique tractors, antique tractors, small farm tractor tour, farmall F-20, international harvester tractors on farm

Id: KDw4w1m1EQ4

Length: 16min 57sec (1017 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 30 2020