Russ's Vintage Iron

One of my uncles recently bought a small-town antique store in his "retirement." I couldn't even tell you the name of it (to give him a shameless plug), but I have been to it in downtown Decatur near the banks of the Missouri River in northeastern Nebraska.

Uncle Jack retired to Decatur after many years of various jobs in the dairy industry in both Iowa and Nebraska. He and my Aunt Marilyn moved to town, but he still wanted something to do with his time so he bought the local antique business.

I believe this is a natural progression for someone from our family. I say this because generally we don't throw anything away that could be used for another purpose someday. Whether that day ever comes or not is another story.

My uncle obviously also has this gene as well. Despite having two farm machinery auctions during his lifetime, he still had a semi-tractor trailer full of stuff when they moved to town. The antique store building was empty when he bought it, but he was able to fill it quickly.

Knowing his brother shares the same gene, Jack has called my dad a couple times to determine if he has certain vintage items. My dad ended up with many of my grandpa's farm-related items, as he and my other uncle took over the farm once my grandpa retired.

Once he called and wanted to know if Dad had any glass bottles from a long-closed dairy in our hometown that bottled their own milk many years ago. We didn't have anything like that.

The other time he wanted to purchase planter plates, as I guess this primitive farm item is sought after by antique collectors. Not surprisingly, we have MANY old planter plates wired together hanging on the walls of the old shed. We have metal ones and plastic ones.

I can barely remember my dad and uncle planting crops with a plate-type planter. They bought a John Deere 1240 four-row planter in the early to mid-1980s, and this was their first planter without plates.

Before that, all of their planters had plates. I can remember being a little kid and them having these bundles of plates in the back of their pickups for the JD 494a planter they had before the 1240.

I will be honest with you -- I never planted a single seed with a planter with plates, so I don't know exactly how they worked. I guess that is not exactly true. We will plant our sweet corn most every year with an old JD two-row loose-ground lister that belonged to my grandpa.

I know seed size was very important when you used these plates. I don't even know if there were crop-specific plates.

I am guessing due to the large number of planter plates we own, different plates were used in planting different-sized seeds and different crops. I will also guess the plastic plates are the newer ones, while the metal plates are from even older planters than the 494a.

My uncle was willing to buy the plates (I assume the metal ones) for a dollar a plate. My dad thought about it but declined to sell them, as he has an emotional connection with them considering they were his dad's and maybe even his grandpa's plates at one time.

So the Quinn junk gene lives on. Someone has a lot of junk to clean out of our farm buildings someday. Most likely that will be my children as the stuff isn't going anywhere on my watch.

I am sure many people reading this column have interesting stories to share about plate-type planters and using them to plant crops. If you do, please send them to me at russ.quinn@dtn.com and I will run them in future columns.

(AG/BAS)

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