Vintage Potato Farming in Ireland Documentary

the earth here is dark and rich ideal for the purpose for which john intends to put it the preparation of ground for a good crop of potatoes john butler is no novice years of experience with horses and a trophy cabinet full of plaques and silverware one at various plowing matches throughout the country has honed his skill to perfection plowing match judges know what they are looking for the furrow slices must be straight they must also be parallel they must be the same thickness and they must be the same height the pair of half-bred clydesdales know well what they are doing too they have done it all before they know the pace at which to walk so there is no need for the master to hold them back they know the master's voice they know their job even so with the shortening day the team will do well to plow an acre of ground before nightfall the village of garva lies 25 miles to the south of valley castle and in the town land of gorty clawhan with a fine view of the antrim hills gilmer linton's family have farmed for generations for gilmer and his helper holly mcfarlane there is a less sedate pace to the plowing these hundred horsepower fords with their three furrow plows will turn over this 12 acre field before bedtime working until after dark and late into the night if necessary plowing matched judges might not view this as work of excellence their tractors are traveling faster than a fast walking pace but the end result of the plows is the same they cut up the deep rooted weeds bury the top growth and offer the soil up to the weather and the frosts of winter for several years now gilmer has planted upwards on 100 acres of potatoes each season but for the past two or three years with crops good and prices bad he's somewhat less optimistic about a successful 1994. this year he plans to plant 60 acres of a variety called nadine which will hopefully find a profitable market in the fish and chip shops of england the clock mills vintage club was formed in 1981 and has a membership of 40. with the help of these members club secretary henry shannon plans this year to grow and harvest his field of potatoes the way it would have been done between the war years and up until the 1960s this orange and fordson came onto the market about 1938 with the threat of war looming henry ford and son began to flood the market with this particular model promising to buy them back if the war threat did not materialize by 1940 with german u-boats sinking as many food convoys as we're getting through britain and ireland were faced with a choice grow your own food or starve the ford gamble had paid off fordson that's how the tractor got its name ford and son we're now working to full capacity producing tractors for a willing and ready market farmers now encouraged to cultivate every bit of spare land were also willing to take the gamble on this new form of farm machinery by 1940 ford changed the color of the m from orange to green the reason for the change was that a green tractor would blend better into the background and would not be so easily seen from the air by a german pilot before the war in the mid-1930s the son of a county down farmer harry ferguson had also made an impression on the world of tractors teaming up with david brown they produced this 1938 ferguson brown one of the first ever tractors to have the three linkage hydraulic system still used in tractors today harry ferguson also teamed up with henry ford for a time during the war producing the ford ferguson by 1946 ferguson had broken his links with both ford and brown and had started producing the famous ferguson t20 at his factory in coventry priced at 325 pounds this versatile little tractor sold well in excess of half a million and indeed they are still quite common on farms even to this day about the same time the david brown crop master came onto the market this petrol tvo model had the clutch and brake pedals on the same side being able to keep both legs together and with a wind faring fitted to the tractor the operator was able to keep much warmer on a cold winter day by mid april and with a little heat returning to the ground willie shannon now begins to break up the soil in preparation for the potato crop with the horses well rested over the winter months john butler is opening the drills in preparation for his crop of cair's pinks the horses are fresh and at times a bit too anxious to quicken the pace but john knows he is being watched he will take the same pride here as he did with his plowing most importantly his first drill must be straight for if it isn't the rest will be difficult to correct brother alex gives a bit of advice drills as straight as a builder's line was the target when this hundred-year-old drill pry was in use on as many as a dozen farms in one season if you had a machine like this around the turn of the century there would be no shortage of neighbors waiting to borrow and stand and watch in amazement as this new implement replaced the old method of the shovel willie anderson begins the planting of the seed potatoes using a bag apron slung in front of him like a satchel in earlier times the bottom of the drills would have been filled with cow manure but by the 1940s and 50s the manure would have been plowed into the ground during the winter so by this time you had at least a clean footing if the weather was dry you had to put down every one down up to uh until the year from the bottom of the ground we used to just stand up straight you know home through and drop them down the other way you had to put the mild done he would spread the way he would come he'd come across a lot of time working in a room and there's much of that much of the cuts other than what five people you know the seed box was also beginning to appear about this time this system ensured that the back was bent at all times the seed were pushed into the drill each in turn nudged with the heel of one boot against the toe cap of the other as jim explained not all farmers were easy to work for some would stride among the drills inspecting measuring and looking for faults and usually finding them easily enough although this ground had been given a dressing of cow manure last winter alex butler now applies artificial fertilizer years ahead of its time was this 1928 one horse drawn potato planter it was awarded a silver medal at the royal lancashire show at oldham that year it is doubtful if this albion ever caught on it was a two-man operation although some would have said that a horse could have been trained to operate on its own strangely enough for the next 20 years there seems to be no record of any other way of planting other than the old back-breaking method by 1949 the ferguson organization were making various farm implements to suit the t20 and other ferguson tractors one such invention was the bell dropper and as its advertisement red was capable of doing the work of three machines planting the potatoes sewing the manure and covering the drills the machine was adjustable drills could be made between 24 and 30 inches wide and the spacing between the seed could be varied between 8 and 16 inches [Music] every time the bell rang a potato seed was dropped down the tube planted into the ground manured and covered up after the first dozen or so rings of the bell the operators would get into a rhythm and could do without the sound signal during the mid 1950s this bamlet dropper appeared similar in many ways to the bell dropper the operators this time placed the seed potatoes into a revolving cylinder this device was supposed to produce very accurate spacings and the tractor could travel slightly faster thereby covering a larger acreage per day however the bell dropper still remained very popular on into the 1970s for the modern man at garvey there is less of a hurry for it is the first week of may before they return to one of the first fields plowed some months ago gilmer doesn't intend to linger here for long his circus of machinery arrived here at 8 30 in the morning and it is the big man's intention to be on the road and into another field by mid afternoon with this five acres cultivated manured and planted for these men the disc and harrow are but a boyhood memory the brake and the grubber have long given way to the large rotavator which could chew up the plowed soil in one run leaving it fine powdery and ready for planting the only manual labor required is to refill the hoppers with manure and seed potatoes during the earlier years of farming most farmers would have grown a few acres of potatoes every year nowadays farming is more intensive men like gilmer with a collection of expensive tractors and implements suited to the potato growing have to harvest many acres in order to make the exercise worthwhile the tractor drivers have many luxuries in the cab heaters for the cold days under radio the local radio station is always popular for most people potatoes still make up part of the staple diet rosemary kennedy from kalibaki is an expert wine maker and very knowledgeable in old irish recipes during the war years meat was rarely eaten a simple inexpensive yet delightful dinner would have been champ this is the way rosemary's mother would have made it 50 years ago i will cut them up bits like that and then they boil more quickly but fairly even sized pieces so that you get the same sort of [Music] cooking time for them half a pint of milk into this saucepan that should be enough put a good big blob of butter a little bit more and add some salt now it does take quite a bit of salt to really give you the flavor that you would want so i would say add a good teaspoonful of salt for the quantity of potatoes that we're going to use i'm going to take these scallions and chop clean them here just cut the tails off them and any ends these give it the flavor you can use chives if you have them this time of the year shams aren't always available and these nice scallions are equally as good i'll chop these up finely i don't want them too big mash these potatoes with my pounder i just take this over [Music] so you just mash your potatoes and your milk up and it does take more milk than what you would think because you don't want it to be um in any way starting you want it to be really nice that when you put it onto a plate and you put a blob of water in the middle you really get a flavor that's typically irish and it's just different so i would use it i would put it in slowly so that you don't get it too soft just keep adding it see this now i don't add the chives or the scallions until i have it at the right consistency because you would destroy them i think that's just about right now i'm just going to taste a little bit to see that i have enough salt because if there isn't enough salt in it it tastes as they would stay in the country worse that needs just a little bit more so i would add a little bit more salt the scallions don't they look lovely now just mix this through with a spoon so that you don't destroy them because you want to keep the scannings in their proper shape now there's a nice pot of champ and now we're going to enjoy that on the plate make a nice whale in the center and take a piece of butter sorry but the noise a good big blob of butter put that in the middle and you have your spoon and you let this melt and you'll see how lovely it looks and the traditional way to have it was with a glass of buttermilk now what more would a farmer or any hungry person want than a plate of chow fudge or potato bread is another well-known irish recipe and here rosemary demonstrates her method the potatoes are boiled in the same way as for the champ we saw earlier all right now i'm just going to take my my potatoes and i'm going to put them into this matcher which is an old-fashioned matter that belonged to my mother and i'll do that the thrill of this was always seeing the potatoes coming out so you just squeeze the potatoes out onto the flour and i will be using about a pound of flour a pound of potatoes on about four ounces of flour now i add some salt to enough salt and then i just knead the flour into the potatoes and potatoes are nice and warm so they're nice and pliable and easy to work with you can actually make potato bread from cold potatoes but they're not nearly as nice to work with you don't add too much flour because if you do you make your potatoes real stodgy i just take another little bit of flour now to put on my board and [Music] don't make them too big some people like big ones but i think that they're certainly easier to handle if you make them small i would just pat them out with my fingers you can use a rolling pin but i think this is a nice feel of it it's worth it just doing it with your fingers and it goes out easily anyway pop a little flour onto a hot griddle and cut your potato bread in four my mother always did this and i think this was to let the air out so that they didn't burst you wouldn't see that they can easily burst and then just pop them onto to cook mommy used to always say that was when you knew they were ready whenever they fed up with steam themselves okay these these farms are ready now they have risen up and i just puncture them to let the steam out and they're ready and everywhere and i put them onto a tea tile or a clean cloth and cover them up see this one is still nice and fat and there's our potato bread you can eat it either hot or cold hot lashings or butter on it and looks lovely now there's nothing nicer than a piece of warm potato bread with a nice piece of butter lashings of butter look at that doesn't look wonderful here you are john enjoy that by mid-june the potato plants at clock mills are green and healthy the next step is to curtail the growth of weeds henry shannon is using this tractor grubber to disturb the soil in the bottom of the drills and all around the plants the teeth of the grubber are set in such a way so as not to disturb the potato roots where the young tubers are beginning to form willie shannon and willie anderson then hoe out the weeds and grass turning out the roots to dry in the sun and die the two men spend the best part of a day hoeing and the field would then be left for a further day good dry sunny weather is the ideal time for hoeing for should the weather be warm and damp there's a good chance that the weeds would take root again the following day willie shannon using the drill plow molds up the potatoes again any weeds which had been missed by the grubber and the hose would soon be smothered by the fast growing young potatoes willie shannon is another man who takes great pride in the strictness of his drills since the middle of the last century the big fear among potato growers was blight the potato blight is a fungus which attacks first the leaves and after being washed down the stalks by rain rots the potatoes growing in the ground in 1882 a frenchman named bordeaux discovered that the spray which he was using to kill a fungus on his grape vines also had a similar effect on the potato blade this mixture is made up of blue stone and washing soda the reason the washing soda is used is because if used on its own the blue stone would burn the leaves willie anderson using this very old back sprayer applies a generous helping of spray to each plant these potatoes will be sprayed every two weeks from now until harvest you're just taking a single drill today in there that's all i can do that's here the only two nozzles on it very cool job what would be a free energy it's a good amount of space three acres today three years just about if we're going right look at that you know yeah but good morning dude what age is that ah that's about to turn the century outside you're 100 years old very old sprayers like many of the jobs involving the horses the barrel sprayer was a two-man operation and for the man pumping this was heavy work the pump was sore on the arms as a constant pressure had to be maintained to keep the nozzles emitting the fine spray he also had to keep a constant watch for the smallest particle of dirt would block a nozzle gilmer linton too is afraid of the blight and has been applying this chemical spray to his potatoes every ten days since the potato leaves were four inches high gilmer's operation is not so sore on the arms for the big ford does the pumping and taking 22 drills at a time he will have the whole field sprayed in about 20 minutes by mid-october the men at ballet castle had started to harvest their crop of cair's pinks the potato spinner was invented in 1852 by james hansen of doke and countiantrum this was probably the most important irish contribution to farm technology during the 19th century and although modified many times the basic system remained the same the digger was pulled along by the horses a large blade cut underneath the drill the large forks revolved as the machine was pulled along and kicked the potatoes out of the drill they were left lying on the ground where they were easily collected if you're enjoying this video please consider subscribing to our youtube channel it only takes a second and it really helps our channel grow this will also help us upload more of these videos in the future and if you have friends who you think would enjoy this video please ask them to also join us here on youtube another invention of the 19th century was this pig's snout digger as the name would suggest it operated like a pig's nose hooking the potatoes from the drill the big problem with this machine was that it was very difficult to keep in the center of the drill and many stops had to be made with so much lifting and resetting the horseman was sure to have a pair of sore arms at the end of the day [Music] like many of the horse-drawn implements the spinner digger was soon adapted to suit the tractors which had taken over from the horse the speed of the tractor determined the speed at which the spinner turned for the big spiked wheels on the digger were the source of power which turned the gearbox inside this potato spinner was made by boyd's of bala money adapted to suit the t20 or ferguson 35 this time the operator could control the speed at which the spinner turned for the power came from a separate power shaft inside the tractor this sturdily constructed implement again from ferguson had two rotating spinners one lifted the potatoes from the drills and threw them into the path of the other the second spinner was supposed to spin the soil away leaving the potatoes lying on top of the ground so that none would be buried this ingenious digger first came onto the market in 1957 many of the same folk who had been employed planting the potato seed in the spring were recruited again for the harvest at this time the workforce was often supplemented with a gang of young gatherers from the nearest school for at that time of the year in most localities the schools closed for two weeks for what was known as pretty gathering holidays some were good gatherers some not so good but by the end of the first day everybody had one thing in common and making back if the farmer did a lot of calculating and measuring at planting time he was sure to be just as fussy at digging time everyone was allocated a strip together so that the digger would not be hindered or have to stop on its next journey up the drills for most of the young people and indeed for many of the adults a watch was an unheard of luxury in those days asking the time especially coming near to meal times was a common question a typical reply would have been it's pretty digging time the faster you gathered the longer your rest period should have been before the digger reappeared in reality however the faster you gathered the more you got together reallocation of territorial allotments was common for the farmer knew from years of experience how to get the maximum amount of work out of everybody if a young person was not pulling his weight or was seen to be carrying on too much his contract would be over at the end of the first day by the early 1960s the wages would have been one pound per day for an adult 14 or 15 year olds would have got 15 shillings that is 75 p per day at garva gilmer's team of laborers have a different structure of payment here you get paid by how hard you work every time a box is filled the gatherers are given a ticket tickets are cashed in at the end of the day or at the end of the week a top gallery working non-stop can earn 40 pounds a day although the average wage is 20 to 25 pounds a day with the incentive to earn such a good week's wage it is hard to believe that over the past 10 years gilmer has found it increasingly difficult to get enough gatherers to help him harvest his crop this elevator digger has a big advantage over the spinners in that it digs two drills at the time and doesn't have to wait until the gatherers have cleared the ground in front of it in fact the whole field could be dug without driving over any of the potatoes from the previous run gatherers prefer this method of digging for the crop is dropped on top of the ground and not scattered over a wide area many gatherers prefer to gather on their knees jerry higgins farms potatoes about a mile from where gilmer farms in the town land of bali lim jerry has overcome the shortage of laborers by investing 33 000 pounds in this keeverland harvester manufactured in holland the two rollers crush any clubs of earth so that when they reach the conveyor belt called the web the agitation causes the earth to fall back onto the ground the four operators simply lift off any stones grass or potato tops allowing only the potatoes to continue the journey they start young around balaam the disc cuts off any potato tops which have fallen over and this prevents them trailing this machine is heavy to pull especially on hilly or soft ground so jerry has cleverly adapted the tractor to produce two power shafts the larger shaft and top is driving the axle of the harvester making the whole unit a six wheel drive many hours of work were done to perfect synchronization so that the harvester and tractor wheels are moving at exactly the same speed the smaller shaft is driving all the other parts from the harvester the conveyor belt transports the potatoes directly into the boxes on the trailer when these boxes are full another tractor and trailer will be standing by so that the harvesting operation is non-stop these potatoes like gilmers are also nadine and already it looks like prices are going to be good this year and alley tie down their load of potatoes in preparation for the two mile journey to gorda klochen where the potatoes will be stored in a heated shed and there they will remain until gilmer decides that the market and price are right the vintage manic clock mills cling to the old method of storage namely the pit or clump this used to be the easiest cheapest and most satisfactory way to store potatoes big stores and sheds were not so plentiful in the 50s and the potatoes might well have been left in the field until the following spring this pit first receives a good dressing of thatch straw rushes were used for this purpose the pit would then have got a good covering of earth three inches deep and this would have kept out the most savage of frosts when the time was right usually about november or december the sorting picking and bagging process would begin this was always a cool job although the man providing the power to the potato dresser could keep himself warm for as he turned the handle he was not only supplying the power to drive the shuffling screens but the clattering elevator as well the wear the large potatoes destined for human consumption were shaken off the top riddle the smaller potatoes which would become the seed for next year's crop would fall through and would travel up a separate elevator in those days the potatoes were bagged into 100 wheat sacks this is another sharp contrast to today's world for a gourd o'clock and the paper bags are only half the weight of the ones used at clock mills for gilmer and his workers there is usually a break at this time of the year and an anxious time of waiting to see if demand will force a decent price for the year's labor the men don't have long to wait for it would seem that most farmers like gilmer have planted less potatoes this year and so there is a good market and a fair price ally tips a box of nadine into the hopper where a slow-moving belt gradually feeds the potatoes onto another conveyor which takes them onto a similar type of sorting device as we saw at clock mills as these potatoes were specially grown for the chip market most of them are large the few smaller ones which do fall through the riddle end up in this box where they will also be stored for seed the larger potatoes travel along this special belt where the bars are turning continuously this constant turning helps to clean the potatoes and also lets the pickers see better for they are looking for any marks blemishes or sunburn any which are not perfect are put onto a separate conveyor and these are called refuse and will go for pig feeding the whole operation is powered by electricity ali uses an automatic sewer to seal up the bags he doesn't have to do any weighing as the conveyor belt will automatically stop when the 25 kilogram weight is reached using the forklift truck the pallets each containing half a ton are loaded onto a lorry by tomorrow morning this load will be in manchester and within two or three days it could be eaten although if necessary they could be stored for up to six months these potatoes would not be considered good eaters here they would be rather soggy gilmer is pleased to see his first 25 tons of nadine on its way so soon after digging the man will have to keep on picking and bagging for another lorry load is required in a couple of days time [Music] if you're enjoying this video please consider subscribing to our youtube channel it only takes a second and it really helps your channel grow this will also help us upload more of these videos in the future so you

Channel: Videos of Irish Farming Life

Views: 547,701

Keywords: traditional farming documentary, documentary, farm, life, rural ireland, old farm video, old, horse, horse work, harvest, Planting potatoes, threshing, mill, thresher, ireland, irish, rural, kerry, john thompson videos, videos of irish farming life, historical documentary, history, vintage, vintage farming, Irish Cooking, Farming Potatoes, Potato, Farming Life, Vintage Potato Farming in Ireland, Irish Documentary, Ploughing, Spuds, Planting Potatoes, Plant, Farming with Horses, Irish Farming, film

Id: wNpeCgzn22w

Length: 34min 29sec (2069 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020