Fred
My blogs
| Introduction | As a young man, I spent a lot of time on a tractor. Mostly an old John Deere two-piston 720 called a "Johnny Pop." We were cotton farmers, and cotton is a labor-intensive crop. Each part of the field has to be passed over by farm equipment at least twelve times: plowing, harrowing, furrowing, cultivating (four times) picking (three times) stock-cutting and discing. Plowing is the slowest of those processes. In my time, the tractor ran at about 3 miles per hour I'd guess, and made a swath about 48" wide. With a large field, it could take over a week to plow the whole thing. There's nothing to do when you're plowing. One of the front tractor wheels rides in a trench created by the last pass of the plow, so it almost steers itself. There's a throttle on the steering column that sets the speed. You're just on there to turn the thing around at the end of the row. No music was available--you couldn't hear it if you had it. So, you sat there ten hours a day and thought, and thought, and thought. Hence the name of this blog. I'm going to record here the things that I mull over when my mind is relaxed. |
|---|