Thirty years ago in 1979, my first job in agriculture ended when my uncle sold the family farm in Benton Harbor. The farm was originally purchased by my grandparents in 1912, shortly after they arrived in this country. I started helping out on the farm around the age of 8, mostly picking raspberries and carrying fruit baskets during peach harvest. This eventually turned out to be my full-time summer job all the way through my undergraduate college years at Michigan State University.
As the years went, by I learned a lot about farming, including the maintenance and repair of buildings and machinery, especially since the tractors and truck on the farm were all rather tired 1950 models or older. By comparison, his 1959 Chevy station wagon was the ultra-modern ritz.
Back when my uncle sold the farm, he gave me the opportunity to buy the tractors and truck I had been driving all those years. As a fresh MSU entomology graduate student hoping to stay in the world of academia, I made the sensible decision to pass on his offer.
Over the next 25 years I slowly came to realize how much those family farm days really meant to me. It has helped me tremendously in my job as an agricultural educator, and I have also saved many thousands of dollars by doing home and automobile repairs by myself. But there was still something missing -- a little hole in my soul that needed filling...
A tractor! Not a new one, of course, but an antique like the one I drove in my days on the farm. I started searching for one, rather casually at first, right after I moved out of town to a home with enough space to have some man-toys.
In 2009, 30 years after I last parked my uncle's Farmall Super A tractor in the barn, I parked my very own Farmall Super A in my garage. The purchase was pure personal destiny, as my tractor is the same model and year (1950) as my uncle's, and I bought it from an old high school friend. It was originally his father's tractor, on a farm less than four miles away from my childhood home; I am fairly certain that I had played around on it as a kid.
My "new" tractor came with all the accessories needed for cultivating vegetables, so I figured I had better grow some vegetables to help justify the purchase price to my wife. I'm mighty proud to say that we ate mostly our own sweet corn this summer and we still have plenty of potatoes left to get through the winter. My wife even approved the purchase of additional equipment for next year's home garden adventures.
Now, if I can just convince her how handy a 1946 Dodge full-ton stake truck would be for getting the weekly groceries...
Dr. Erwin "Duke" Elsner is the agricultural educator for Michigan State University Extension in Grand Traverse County
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