Fuel For The Fire

Getting lazy here. Just another video of firewood sawing last weekend. Poplar is not the best firewood compared to maple , birch or oak but it is plentiful here and produces heat. The old saying that firewood warms you more than once is true. Cutting the trees down in the bush, then sawing it into stove lengths will certainly produce a little body heat long before the firewood hits the wood stove.
That 65 year old (or more) Wisconsin V4 engine that runs the saw used to be the power plant on my Dad's Case model A pull type combine for the first 20 years of it's life. To me there's no sound quite like a V4 engine working so turn up the speakers and enjoy..........

Lazy Farmer 15

Things are pretty slow here on the farm in winter. Even more so when the wind chill factor hits the -40 mark as it has recently. We have been spoiled by the mild weather up to this point that its a real shock dropping nearly 50 degrees off our daytime high temps. At least I don't feel so guilty about sitting in the house by the stove like the old Lazy Farmer cartoons from the sixties.

Threshing at Motherwell Farm

A new year of ramblings begins.
I shot this video on vhs back in August of 92 at the Motherwell Farm's annual threshing demonstration. They re-enact the process of threshing grain just as it was done when the farm was a working farm circa 1911. Of course they can't push the old Hart Parr tractor too hard and with a limited amount of grain sheaves to work with , they have to make it last for a couple of days worth of demos anyway. This time they got perfect harvest weather. The kind my Dad used to talk about with the blazing hot sun, grain dust, and a seemingly endless supply of stooks to be hauled in from the field to the thresher.
No slackers allowed here as the hungry thresher had to be kept running to capacity blowing a steady stream of separated straw out the blower and a stream of clean grain into the bin. When it was all done, Dad's wages went towards paying the threshing bill. After a few years of this I guess the army looked pretty good with 3 meals and a dollar a day when he joined up in 1941.