Serving Proudly As The Voice Of Valley County Since 1913

Custom Cutters, Camper Trailers of Yesterday

I don’t remember a lot about custom combining. I remember that many of them arrived in my hometown about the time school started. Maybe there were some young boys on the crews that accounted for the notice of arrival, but likely it was all of the equipment parked along the outskirts of town.

Did they have specific farms on their schedule or did customers come to them? Our community also had local people who put together crews and headed south to custom combine. The string of equipment lined up, ready to leave looked quite different from the present-day crews.

One major thing missing in those early day equipment lineups was a camper trailer. I can vaguely remember comments about showers, etc. being available to the crew at certain spots along the way. What do you suppose the average header length was?

I don’t know when semis became a common piece of every farmer’s equipment, but I do know that most of the grain hauling trucks were just that, a common 1- or 2-ton truck with grain sides and extensions (tip tops?) and if the owner was fortunate he had a truck with a hoist, otherwise it must have been shovels for unloading. Think of handling crops of today that way.

Even further back in time the threshing bees may have been a forerunner to custom harvesting, although I always thought of that as neighbor helping neighbor, without any exchange of funds. My conjecture only.

 

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