43 Replies to ““It was sitting in the trees on the south end of Gull Lake.””

  1. Ha ha ha yeah I grew up running that kind of equipment. Our old Oliver 99 1942 edition would drag our 10 ft Graham Plow cultivator which in turn pulled our McCormick double disc steel wheel drill. We filled the drill with buckets or shovels being careful not to spill any seed. The only thing missing in the picture is the fertilizer attachment for the drill. It would hang off the back of the seed box and drop fertilizer into the furrow with the seed.

  2. Good for Carson Ebeling. It is nice to see that equipment being restored and used.

    I also have memories, such my eagerness when my dad brought home an Allis WD45 and semi retired the horses. In spring and fall he would wear a heavy buffalo robe coat to keep warm. I could stand on the axle while leaning and holding onto the fender. In 1974, my own first 10 year old 830 Case with a rear door cab and a 10 year old twelve foot International discer, which I loaded with a five gallon pail and fifty pound bags of fertilizer, was a big improvement over his equipment.

    1. “I could stand on the axle while leaning and holding onto the fender.”
      You could fit at least 3 kids standing on a tractor and nobody died. We hung on tight in those days.

      “a heavy buffalo robe coat”
      My grandfather brought a heavy, close to ankle length, fur coat from Russia – in his case likely not buffalo. More likely beef.

  3. Oh, dear, won’t he get into trouble with Red Rachel? After all, isn’t he violating the terms of Bill 6?

    Seriously, though, this young man’s initiative shows that there still might be hope for this country.

  4. If Rachel Notley finds out a 14 year old is a farm hand she will determine he is taking jobs away from union workers and there will be consequences for the family. Ha

    Growing up in rural Sask in the 60s, that was pretty standard. It’s a lost lifestyle that is good to see a young man is embracing. He’s got good parents.

    1. Many years ago Dad was feeling nostalgic and thought he would teach his son (me) about the fine art of stooking bundles. He cut 80 acres of oats with an old McCormick binder and a few days later he and I went out to stook. We walked the half mile down and the half mile back then down again then back again. Suddenly the romance of the binder was lost on him and he phoned the local Hutterite colony that owed him a favor. Next morning we went to milk the cows at 6 in the morning and we looked out at the 80 acres of cut oats. There was a long line of men and women all dressed in black working their way south to north stooking as they went. They finished the field before lunch.

      1. Tired of stooking? That’s a third of the problem. You still have to pick them up and pitch them in the threshing machine. Every other farmer had horses for picking up stooks. My father had a hand clutch Case tractor that I started driving when I was 6 or 8 so he didn’t have to get on and off the tractor.

        1. Yeah we had an old Minnie U with a hay sweep on it. Dad used it with great effect in scooping up the stooks and putting them on the rack. I had the dubious job of arranging the bundles on the rack so they wouldn’t fall off. I remember the threshing machine from when I was younger but these oats were for cattle feed. We ran them through the hammermill and turned it all into chop.

      2. If you bound and stooked wheat/oats/barley then you were around for threshing. The dust so thick you couldn’t inhale if anyone lit a match the barn would go up like a nuke. Stooking was tedious.

      1. Did you mean … threshing? But yes … I am a thrasher … from birth. A congenital thrasher.

    2. Heh…remember when you/we misheard that as bringing in the ‘sheep’? Made more sense then. 🙂

  5. “thought he would teach his son (me) about the fine art of stooking bundles. He cut 80 acres of oats”
    80 acres of stooking is s a bit more teaching than anyone requires.
    (BTW spell ck doesn’t know about stooking-pity)
    That seed drill is a John Deere-Van Brunt. The only reason I know that is because Grand-pa had one. Van Brunt made good seed drills and after spurning IHC’s offer to purchase, John Deere made Van Brunt an offer the company couldn’t turn down. John Deere kept the Van Brunt name on their seed drills until about the sixties.

  6. God bless and keep that boy.

    Boys like Carson Ebeling can look forward to driving Cadillacs by age 40—and buying out bankrupt Quebec subsidy farmers for a penny an acre, while chain gangs staffed by former globalists and urban bloodsuckers do all the farm work we are assured Canadians won’t do.

    On Canada Day, thank an Alberta farmer for keeping the nation fed. Tell a Quebec farmer: “mange d’la marde.”

      1. I know what I said.

        More to the point, I know what the scum of New France say.

        1. A Canadian and Scar:
          Oh you’re both comedians…
          Scar: your spelling is correct.
          A Canadian: your pronunciation sounds about right.

          From Nancy: you add one word @ the end. So it goes like this ” mange la marde twee”! So, if you’re really p.o. it’s
          ” mange la marde twee là” !
          No ” d’la”.

          ” twee” is slang for “toi” the informal word for “you” .
          And “moi” , would be, “mwee” in Québec slang, for the word me in English. They like saying “there” so ” là” with the accent is “there.”

          Right? A Canadian?

          1. Please excuse us, Carson Ebeling, about the above jokes.

            Good for you, there will always be good people around to help you along. May you have a long and prosperous life. Happy Canada Day.

          2. More of a “mway” than “mwee”, as in “mway pee tway,” but more or less, yes, Nancy.

    1. LOL. Carson can look forward to some government subsidies, and being increasingly redundant/obsolete as vertical farming and other innovations gain acceptance. What he’s doing is…quaint and I wish him well, but he’s not getting rich off it, unless he really games those subsidies.

      1. It is in the interest of the nation’s security to ensure that feeding the nation is always profitable for the nation’s farmers.

        That’s not how our system works. What Quebec farmers do is cash cheques written on the accounts of the English and then sell us foul-tasting dairy products at outrageous prices, blissfully immune from competition. I wouldn’t be surprised if they really did lace their cheese with cowdung, just so they could say “les crisses d’Albertains sont bien pleins de marde, sti!”

        1. “sell us foul-tasting dairy products”

          You mean that cheese that tastes like battery acid with the texture like gravel comes from Quebec? That’s what we pay triple what it’s worth? I should have known.

        2. “It is in the interest of the nation’s security to ensure that feeding the nation is always profitable for the nation’s farmers.”

          FO slaver. It’s already plenty profitable. Subsidize them with your own money.

  7. I stooked many a stook long time ago. And tossed the sheaves into the threshing machine too. A few years later I drove the self-propelled combine that replaced the vintage harvesting machinery. Was active in the farming operations since I was big enough to reach the clutch and brake pedals. Lots of hard work, but no regrets – it was a great growing up experience.

    Wheat Stooks

  8. It’s not often we read a “heart warming” story on a political blog, but this one sure qualifies. Blessings on that fine young man.

  9. The last thing I would want to do is discourage the young man, but I have a question for you farmers.
    How would his yields compare with the yields produced by using modern equipment?

    1. I don’t want to detract from a great question but you should be asking about the yield in dollars per 100 acres subtracting out the cost of the modern equipment. The cost of the young man’s vintage equipment is $0.00.

    2. Could a young guy with guts and determination succeed like that? Absolutely.
      ‘You simply make the coat according to the cloth you have on hand’ or my favorite ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.

  10. Now, up on the Altiplano of North Glengarry, the tractor of choice for the real men was the rock-breaking McCormick Deering W30. The lesser fellows down in the lowlands stuck with the girly tractors like the W4s and W6s.

    So I’m glad to hear this young fellow is starting out with something light before he breaks into the big leagues.

  11. I encourage to Carson to think good and hard.

    Cost per acre to plant-harvest soy beans per Ontario Ministry of Ag is ~$275 /acre.
    That doesn’t include cost of having your name on a deed or renting the land.
    $10,000 per acre @ 4% Farm Credit mortgage = $400 per acre. Bringing the total cost to $675/acre.
    Renting the land would cost less but you loose out on all that capital appreciation, i.e., price inflation.
    At 44 bushels per acre at $11.35 (today’s price) = $500 per acre.
    For putting in endless hours, assuming weather and market risk , book keeping, purchasing, repairs, marketing etc etc etc…he looses money. Year after year he goes to the bank and increases his operating line to the point where all those lands he inherited debt free from grandpa are now mortgaged to the hilt.

    To pay for social programs for urban voters, once the socialists have maxed out what they can extract though income taxes, they will enforce a wealth tax on farmers. That trial balloon has already being floated.

    I ask myself why would anyone keep doing this to keep so many clueless, ungrateful, entitled , useless urban eaters fed? It is what it is. Farm people just have different values and lifestyle and if it were easy, anyone could be a farmer. Good luck Carson.

    1. “clueless, ungrateful, entitled , useless urban eaters fed?”

      Those are the people paying for the food and the subsidies. The cities are where most of the wealth is generated.

  12. “…Farm people just have different values and lifestyle …”

    Some do, some don’t. The independent, dusty old farmer that McLauchlan sang about is hard to find. Far too large a chunk of the remainder have no problem with supply management systems or crop “risk mangement” programs that screw the consumer.

  13. Clueless Flatlanders have no idea where their food comes from while they mindlessly donate to Eco-Wacko groups who want to put farmers out of bsuisness turn the farmlands into wildlands as dictated by the Eco-Nazis/Watermelons why else do they use the ESA as a excuse to cut off water like they did in The Central Valley and Klamath Basin

  14. Here’s a great story to share with youth to give them a better awareness of the world we live in. It’s an excellent British animation (1954) of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. A cartoon movie of life under Marxist-Socialist Communism.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ibe-BgqwNg

    As for values in an age of moral relativism, a great story for the young is The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck published in 1931 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Audio books available on-line

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