Russ' Vintage Iron

OMAHA (DTN) -- A couple of weeks ago, my family and I took a family vacation. We drove to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, came back through Cheyenne, Wyoming and the Nebraska Panhandle. My younger two kids had never seen this region before, so it was fun short trip.

When we were driving in southeastern Wyoming, we drove by a hayfield and among the equipment sitting at the edge of the field was a tractor and chopper. The tractor was a 1960s vintage International tractor and I don't really have any idea what brand of chopper it was.

When I was kid, my dad had a Fox chopper with a couple different heads. There was a corn chopping head and couple of hay chopping heads. I think he ever only used the one head in which you could "green chop" -- go into a standing forage field, chop into a wagon and feed the chopped forage to cattle right away.

The Fox River Tractor Company was formed in 1919 in Appleton, Wisconsin, according to the website https://agriculturalmachineryengineering.weebly.com/…. The company manufactured some tractors. By 1923, it began to make silo fillers and started to manufacture forage harvesters (choppers) in the 1930s, according to the website.

The Fox River Tractor Company introduced a corn chopping head in the 1940s and by 1950, the company had unveiled a lighter design and quick-change attachments. By 1960, the company had introduced a self-propelled forage chopper.

The company was sold in 1970, and then again in 1981. It was sold one last time in 1986 and Fox forage chopper production ceased operation.

My dad would green chop alfalfa later in the growing season with our pull-type Fox chopper when the pasture grass was just about gone for our small herd of cow-calf pairs. He would sacrifice some winter feed to chop alfalfa to help feed the cows right then.

This was during a period when I was teenager, and I REALLY wanted to drive anything I could. He would let me drive his old 1973 Ford F-100 orange pickup out to the hayfield with wood hayracks and then back to our farm. I was probably 12-13 years old.

The old pickup was a typical farm vehicle -- one you wouldn't want to drive too far from the farm but worked well for short trips. The floorboards of the old pickup were rusty, so much so you could see the ground if you picked up the mats.

However, it was kind of nice on those hot summer days to have some "natural" air conditioning coming from the floor when we were hauling with the truck.

At some point about this time, Dad bought what we called a "Ruff feeder," which was a self-feeder for hay/silage on wheels. We could put more forage in this feeder on wheels compared to the hayracks.

Dad would chop directly into this wagon, pull the wagon into the cow lot to empty, and then we would pull it back to the alfalfa field on the back side of the farm. We became a little more efficient as this wagon was larger and could hold more chopped forage and the cows didn't waste as much as they did with the flat rack.

In later years, we would take the chopper and green chop some small brome grass patches people would give us. This involved a little more driving as these patches were several miles away. Even in the 1990s, our little town outside of Omaha had become more of a suburban area and with this came much more traffic.

When our farm moved roughly 30 miles to the north in 1997, this was the end of green chopping as the distance between the hay field and the cattle was considerably more. We just baled up the alfalfa and brome down there and then hauled all of the bales up to the farm.

The Fox chopper and its heads went up north of us but never got used again. After sitting in the trees for many years, we had someone stop and buy some of our old farm machinery for scrap and the Fox chopper and its heads went to the metal recycler.

Recently, someone on social platform X had a very similar Fox chopper and headers for sale like the one we had. This chopper, however, had sat in the shed for most of its life and was mostly orange. Our chopper had not ever sat inside and was mainly a rusty color.

You really don't see much forage green chopped anymore, at least not in our area. Seeing this type of forage harvesting while traveling brought back some fun memories of my younger days.

Russ Quinn can be reached at Russ.Quinn@dtn.com

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