A beautiful Easter here today temps up around 60 for only the second day this year. Wet,wet, snow, and cold sums up the weather here. Snowed several inches on Friday and was down in the low 20s yesterday morning. Rain expected tomorrow and through the week. We have not done a thing in the fields, no fertilizer broadcast on the winter wheat or anything. Pretty rare to start this late on the lower elevation ground. If we get two weeks of dry weather in early to mid May our spring seeding might work out alright, get much later seeding into late May or June and yields tend to drop off rapidly by the day and some good July rains become necessary.

First pic is an erosion ditch in the winter wheat, the worst erosion we had all winter actually occured in early April. Most of our fields are okay but some nearby ones eroded worse than they have in years.



Next pic is a south slope on the wheat near home. You can see it is not growing fast at all.



Next pic is the lowest elevation ground, looks alright but needs some fert and dry weather.



Changed the wil-rich cultivator over from points to sweeps





Early 70's model D5 98j SA at the deere dealer, looked to be in pretty good shape.



The new truck, 1990 peterbilt with a 3406B cat engine and 15sp transmission. 1.5 million miles but in very good shape with recent overhauls. Our home storage is not set up for belly dump and some access roads into fields could not fit a semi so we will put a bed and hoist on it and haul 500bu loads.



new 60' harrow cart with 5 bars of heavy flex harrow, just finishing up getting it ready to go.

NIF - thanks for the interesting pictures. It's been a long springtime.

Saw a very rare tractor today at the CaseIH dealer in Colfax, WA. The last of the steel track ag tractors...the caterpillar Ag 6 made in the late 1980's.

16,400 hours on it.

Thanks for the pics, NIF. I will have to stop in and check this one out. I sat in a new one at the Ag show in Spokane when they first were introduced, was quite a spectacle at the time. Today we worked at the elevator all day transferring wheat and fighting the wind. One of the nasty-est days I can remember in a long time, but at least we didn't have to deal with tornados. We have it pretty good out here compared to what I grew up with in the Midwest. Sunday sounds promising, maybe dry enough to cultivate with the D6 a little?

Thanks for the photos of the AG 6. I've tried to figure out what was so special about these units over the D6 SA tractors. I know that they had a 7 roller track frame and the drawbar was lower but we did the drawbar thing on our old D6C 74A. That little trick made a big difference in the way the 74A pulled a load, especially on a steep hill. Much much better!
What else did they do besides twist the seat?

Casey

Hey cuz, I think Cal Cherry still has one of these, it has been sitting there North of Paso at his store for quite some time. I don't know anything about them except they look great. Great pictures from everybody, lets keep it going:lol:Tad

Casey- I am not sure what really was new about the ag-6 other than what you mentioned. Partially I think cat was just trying to get a new look to maybe save some sales as up here even in the hilly palouse lots of JD, Steiger, and Versatile 4wds were being sold and replacing steel tracks. The late model D6D SA cats actually came with a 7 roller frame as I understand it and the variable horsepower feature same as the ag 6 plus the factory cab and hydraulics of course.

We finally started field work yesterday and then were rained out this afternoon. Still very wet and we have been unable to cultivate an entire field yet but we did get fertilizer on nearly all the winter wheat with help from the co-op who floated a bunch of acres while we used our own spreader on other fields.

Just a few pics of what I was running. As I mentioned before this is new harrow, not super impressed with its straw handling but it is a little better than the old one.

I do like how the wil-rich performs with the sweeps on it, it moves more dirt so it levels the ground better and pulls weeds up completely unlike the points. It pulls a bit harder but I still can climb most everything in 5th gear.

I noticed that this thread just went past 100,000 views. Thanks everyone who has contributed.

Thank you for taking the time to get this thread started and sticking with it. I'm like a lot of others and check it every day to see if there is anything new. I really appreciate yours, 98J's and bleedinred's efforts. You all have educated us on the techniques of hillside farming in the PNW. I must also say that it has been fun to see the contributions by so many others from all over the world. Like cousin Tad said, I hope it keeps going because it's very interesting for this old man.

Talk about old,I feel really old today after taking the belly pans off the 6 yesterday. Wrestling the one inch impact over my head lying on my back in the dirt let me know how old I really am.

I kick myself for not taking more pictures when I was farming, but that was the last thing on my mind and we thought the hillside farming would last forever so there would always be next year. Our problem was that we lived in some of the best next year country there was. All of a sudden, next year didn't come.

I like your harrow and cart. Looks like about 60 feet? With those big long spikes they will get a little wear in the top straps and then it should spread the straw around.

Is your Willrich a 42 footer? That's pretty impressive, charging around in 5th and 6th gear. You're right with that kind of speed they will sure give the weeds a good tumble.

We pulled a 32ft John Deere of the same vintage with the flex harrows chained to the back. That was a good load for the old D6C 74A and the HD11 AG. We didn't stick the power to out tractors like you guys do in the PNW. We probably should have, we might still be in business.

Casey

Casey- the harrow cart turned out to be 58.5ft. A very good width to get a lot of work done and it will fit most places but there are a couple scab patches that 44ft barely fit behind.

Yes the wil-rich is 42ft. The D6C handles this cultivator better than both the D6B and D4D handle the 30ft krause with similar spacing.

Our issue with cultivating for weed control in the spring is that we can pull up all the weeds but then we dont get enough heat and dry to kill them before the next rain and then they re-root. Back in the old days we made more tillage passes because of incorporated herbicides and had pretty good weed control with the usual 4 spring tillage trips instead of the usual 2 today. Many people solve this now by spraying roundup on the chiseled ground first thing in the spring and then cultivating just to smooth up ground and spread residue.