What is it? Mysterious Farm Equipment, Redux

Anyone know? ( photo / image / picture from Cayuga Morning's Garden )

My husband, brother & I are again at the old family farm in western NY state. Last year I posted some pix of mysterious farm equipment. This year's photo is equally mysterious. Whoever can give the most creative answer wins a seed. Whoever gives the "correct" answer also wins a seed. Whoever just says anything will get a seed too! What do you have to lose?

 

It's a hay rake.

 

Ding Ding Ding! You get a seed for the correct answer! (I just googled hay rakes & lo & behold there was one pictured just like this one) I guess it was too easy for you farm dwelling folk.

 

Yep... hay rake. See 'em all over.

 

Yeper, never saw a prettier pic of a hay rake before! But that is a newer model of one! When I was a kid I used to tow an old spring rake all over the hay fields here. That was in the 50's and it was an antique then. It was converted from being pulled by horses to be used with a tractor.

 

In 1881 Phineas T. McBride was presented with a an ever increasing problem. The back yard of his bicycle shop was filling up with old wheel rims. The ruts and gullies of the local roads made the rims unusable after riders had had many accidents but he did not know what to do with the unusable rims. Farmer Brown happened into the shop to pick up his daughter's broken tricycle and they got to talking. It was hay season and he was short handed for workers to rake the hay. Phineas, always the tinkerer, had an idea for a hay rake but needed a farm to try out his idea. He had taken an old wheel and made longer spokes that extend away from the rim. He then bent the spokes in a curve. Mounted on the back of an old piece of farm equipment and powered with a pulley, the old rim whirled away as the horse pulled the new contraption across a cut field. More rims and more connections and Phineas had farmer Brown’s labor problem solved.

Jerry

 

It really is a beautiful piece of equipment.

 

Surprisingly, I knew what that was!

 

Yep! We have them here, too. There was one in a field on the road into town a few weeks ago. Sure are different from when I lived on a farm a long time ago.

dooley

 

God bless Phineas T. McBride! We see huge hay rakes going by, pulled by enormous tractors. We are in farm/ranch country, and the size of some of the equipment that goes by would make a dinosaur blush!

 

and I thought that was what farmers used to play wheel of fortune. Never seen one before ...

 

I recognised it... but then it flew the coop. It is the new stuff going down the road that I have no clue what they do with it. Since it is painted John Deere Green, I figure it is farm equipment for some big industrial sized farm. Ordinary farmers cannot afford such luxury items.

 

you could set one up for rides at the fair...whatch ya think of that idea?

 

Maybe knitters could do complicated things with it with their yarn...