Horses And Machines

We kept and raised a couple of female calves to be used later as replacements in the dairy herd but they were never much good. We had another bad setback that first year. We brought with us from Roxborough two work horses to do some of the heavy work and we were given another by my cousin John Byrne. In the early summer all three horses died from an ailment that horses get from eating feed that ferments in the stomach and forms a gas. It seems that cattle can pass off this gas and it doesn't hurt them, but horses cannot do this and it kills them. We had been buying brewery grains to feed the cows and Mike gave some to the horses.
So we gave up using horses and after looking around we found and bought a second-hand Fordson tractor along with a disc plow and disc harrow. They were well worn but after much work and repair they were very usable and continued to be for several years. Later on I bought a new John Deere tractor with attachable cultivator. I liked that one very much and found it very economical. But the steel wheels and wheel cleats wre not good at making hay because the cleats would dig out clogs of dirt and make the hay dirty and dusty. So after two years I traded it in for a new Minneapolis Moline tractor also with cultivator. This was a wonderful machine and I kept it and used it until I gave up farming for myself several years later.