Cool find in the Tractor Shed

[wolffman]

I found this in my late grand dad's old poppin johnny shed. It's a hand crank applicator. He used it on his corn/cotton fields back in the old days. I imagine it has handled some pretty bad stuff lol. Anyway, I cleaned it up and it works like new, sounds like a little jet engine when you crank it fast.

 

[w_r_ranch]

Beats the plastic dusters that the sell for $45+/- nowadays...

 

[Mike]

Very cool. Is that the before or after picture?

 

[wolffman]

Very cool. Is that the before or after picture?

This was the after Mike. The fan assembly was filled with mud dauber nests. I washed all that out, oiled up all the moving parts and it works like new. It originally had a leather belt that one would tie around the waist and another strap that went over your shoulder. Imagine dusting 60 acres of cotton that way lol.

 

[Mike]

Imagine dusting 60 acres of cotton that way lol.

Certainly beats doing it by hand though, haha. Do you know by chance how long it would take someone to do a field that large with the duster you have?

 

[ErnieCopp]

Yan could probably calculate this exactly, but just noodling it, an acre planted with four foot spacing would have about 2 miles of row per acre, so that would be 120 miles of walking, if he could only dust one row at a time. There was a lot of walking required to farm back in those days.

Ernie

 

[wolffman]

My mom says that grandpa and sons would spend over a week dusting a single application. That was considered the easy part of the crop. She said the picking was the worst. They picked it all as a family, dawn to dusk until it was all done. All the horse drawn equipment is still in its place on the farm, cool stuff to look at.