Potato diggin’ machines have sure grown up

The Way I See It
By Bev Rand
    Aroostook County is not dead or dying if you can judge by the harvest equipment that is being used to harvest the bountiful potato crop. The state of Maine is not dying agriculturally, if you use the same measure as the dairymen harvest their corn crop.
    On a recent Saturday we drove to Mars Hill and onto a farm that was at work harvesting their 1,600 acres of potatoes. That morning we were told they harvested 50 acres – that's 10 acres per hour!
    The equipment was enormous. There were three windrowers – one six row and two four row, each with a sizable Case farm tractor – digging the potatoes and placing them in between the four rows that the harvesters would be digging, making it eighteen rows in one trip. The harvester conveyed these potatoes into a bulk truck traveling along beside it. These five trucks had a capacity of two hundred barrels, two being driven by very capable women. It took less than a half hour to load a truck. Contrasting that to our earliest one-row harvester when digging five acres in a day had us thinking that we were doing well.
    This self-propelled four-row harvester is huge, yet is operated by just one person. If it is taken on the highway it requires a police escort as it takes up the whole highway. The large air fans lift the potatoes from the rocks and onto the conveyer to the truck – no hands required.
    At the 200-foot-long potato storage, where the trucks unload, are adjustable for length that will pile potatoes 20 feet high or more. This well-insulated Quonset-type storage had trenches under the potatoes for proper moisture control in the storage. Water would flow through them as needed.
    We could see their lengthy irrigation system in the next field. The good-size irrigation pond also had a very nice cabin with a well-mowed lawn.
    On a dairy farm in southern Maine that I am acquainted with, they have a six-row corn and haylage chopper that will chop five or more acres per hour. This keeps three self-dumping trucks busy. The need for this efficient equipment for the dairyman is to let the corn grow to its most nutritive value and harvest it before frost. Good equipment is essential to doing this.
    In reading an article in the Bangor Daily News, Clinton, Maine, there are seven dairymen with 7,000 cows – more cows than people. They must have top-notch equipment and this is an indication that agriculture is doing okay in Maine.