Sodbuster. Clodhopper. Nester. Words used to describe farmers, particularly the first wave of farmers to come into an area. In this part of the country, that wave of farmers came rather late, the first decade of the 20th Century.
Big ranches ran cattle across open ranges at the end of the 19th century. The Homestead Act that populated other parts of the country after the Civil War didn’t reach here until the beginning of the 20th century. The range wars between ranchers and “nesters” didn’t result in much violence.
My grandfather arrived in 1907-08. He became a sodbuster who broke out a chunk of the open prairie.
And now, I follow in his footsteps, sort of. Papa would assure me that driving a tractor is not work, as he did once when I was a kid coming home tired and dirty from a long day of running a tractor for a neighbor. Real work was walking behind a team of horses, controlling the depth and direction of the plow by hand. A single bottom plow, not a five-bottom one.
My grass was farm ground twenty years ago. The settlers were dealing with centuries of grass.
I also fudged in another way. I pulled a chisel over the grass before plowing. That loosened the soil some and made plowing somewhat easier. Here is the “weapon” and the results of chiseling.
Here we are at the center of the field where the chisel operation ended and the plow operation began.
Then the plow. I hope to have a better plow action picture soon, but not today.
It looked like this before I started.
Here’s what it looks like after chisel.
One of these days, I will get done, two snow storms and an inch and a half of rain later. It took 30 hours to complete the chisel operation. So far I have 47 hours in plowing. It will take another 15-20 hours to complete. I will try to get a picture of the after-plow soon. But not today. Today it is raining. (Can’t complain. If it doesn’t rain, nothing grows.) Wait a minute, make that snowing.
Anyhow, for better or worse, good or evil, I am now a genuine sodbuster.
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