When you are planting one thousand acres of corn on five different farms, you use a lot of diesel fuel. In some cases the tractors were operated 24 hours a day. The gasoline tank had an electric pump and the diesel tank had a hand pump. The decision was made to put the electric pump on the diesel and the hand pump on the gasoline. This worked well for about a week or until the owner drove up in his new Oldsmobile. Knowing that the electric pump was gasoline, he proceeded to fill the car up with diesel. Once he realized what had happened, he tried to drive to the Oldsmobile dealership to get the tank drained. By the time he got there, the car needed a new engine. The pumps got changed back.

  Once, while hauling a full load of cattle on a bumper pull trailer, as I went to stop for a turn, the entire bumper fell off of the truck. Fortunately the truck was stopping as the trailer ran into the back of it. We used the jack on the trailer to lift the tongue off the road, chained it up to the truck frame and continued on to our destination. Safety chains are not much use when the entire bumper hits the ground.

  As we stood at the barn one day, we could see a farm hand plowing a fifty acre field. The problem we noticed was the fact that the rear gang of discs was not attached to the cutting harrow. It appeared that the driver was never going to look back. We drove out and stopped the tractor, found the rear gang and drug it back to the barn. It was nothing that the old Lincoln welder couldn’t handle.

  We worked cattle with horses and we found ourselves in need of another horse. We contacted a friend of ours who was a horse trader. I explained to him what I was looking for and he said he would find just the right horse. About a week later, he called and said that he had left the perfect horse in our coral. There stood the prettiest quarter horse mare that we had ever laid eyes on. Knowing that the most dangerous thing that you can undertake is shopping for a horse, I decided to ride her in the coral for a couple days. Everything was fine. We had a crew working on a fence so I decided to ride the horse down to see how they were doing. As soon as I took the horse out of the coral, she ran away with me. She grabbed the bit and took off. I tried pulling her head to the right and then to the left. She only went faster. I headed her across a plowed field, she sped up. The chin strap on the bridal broke, so as we approached the woods on the other side of the field, I decided to step off. I plowed up a good bit of dirt, but was otherwise unhurt. The horse immediately stopped and waited on me. I led her down to where the fence was being built, cut me a piece of that small barbed wire and used it to replace the chin strap. I got back on and we had a very peaceful ride back to the coral. I called my friend and told him that I didn’t think she was right for me. He later said that she had tried to run away with him at the sale barn.

  When you are farming, getting stuck is not unusual and I have been stuck on several notable occasions. The most story worthy time was when we were building a fence around two hundred and seventy acres. The dozer had pushed the line through the woods and when they came to a small creek, they laid some logs in it and covered them over with dirt. The water could still run through the trees and we could drive across the top. 

  We had set the brace posts and pulled a strand of wire to mark the line. A pickup truck was in front of me laying out steel post and I was running the 3020 John Deere with the post driver. When we got to the creek, the pickup went right across with no issue, but when the tractor got there the front axle sunk up to the frame. We were not in a very accessible place. We tried to use other tractors to pull it out, to no avail. I called some friends who worked for a timber company and asked if they could bring a dozer to see if it could save us. They showed up one day with a D9 Caterpillar so big that we would have to tear down about three gates to get it back there. I think they were joking anyway. The tractor set there for two weeks until we finally found a man with a wrecker. We got it to the tractor with some difficulty and had to chain it to a tree, but it got us out. We finished that section by hand and then built a bridge. I thought all this was lost in my memory categorized as things to forget, but once I got started, I could not stop.