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| That's what I must have been back in 1973 when I started out on my 15 year absence from my home.
I got transfered by Agway from the local mill to Clyde NY to be assistant production manager on this newly built egg production facility. Eventually I became production manager.
This was a 10 house layer operation with each building housing 30,000 birds. All the egg gathering was inline and fed directly into the processing building in the middle where they were packaged for retail sales.
These were equipped with Big Dutchman "Flat Deck" cages systems where you rode over the cages on a tram, supported on 3 rails. The cages literally went wall to wall. It was a system that was custom designed to fail, and it did it well.
Manure cleanout happened every spring and fall, and took an average of 30 hours per house. That made for a long month on the tractor seats. We paid to have a machine and operator do the loading and gave away as much manure as our neighbors could haul.
Keep in mind, when I left home, we had a JD B, and a Ford 9N. After my arrival, I took delivery of a new JD 4230 with full cab, a 2520 open station, and a used 3010 with a front end loader. I was in hog heaven.
We used no commercial fertilizer and planted around 150 acres of corn. We planted corn after corn for 10 years and the most that Cornell would say about our program was that we wouldn't live long enough to see the problems that we'd be developing. Manure was spread wheel track to wheel track as slow as we could go.
Just got looking at some old pix and thought this might interest some here. Sorry for the pic quality as it's a pic of a pic.
Ron | |
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A BTO
