It was a stifling hot summer day, and health authorities were recommending that people – especially senior citizens – seek a shady spot or an air-conditioned room, drink lots of water and limit their activity.
That morning, David Dunn, of Brooklyn, who farms in the town of Oregon, called to invite me to come down and watch his 79-year-old father, Vernon Dunn, and uncle Gerald Dunn, then 85 years young, combine some oats with a 1965 John Deere Model 30 combine.
Of course, it was an invitation not to be overlooked: How often can one see two older farmers combining oats with a 40-year-old combine, pulled by a 1969 John Deere tractor putting grain into a early 1950s grain wagon being pulled by a 1955 Allis Chalmers tractor?
And to top if off, the Dunn brothers were wearing their long-sleeved farm shirts and overalls – and not at all concerned by the health warnings running on Madison radio stations.
“This is nothing compared to the days when we pitched bundles into the threshing machine and stacked straw,” Vernon says. “This is fun!”
About a year later, we returned to the city of Fitchburg to visit with Gerald and Ruth Dunn, and delve into the history of their 1867 stone barn standing along Seminole Highway.
The barn was already 54 years old when John and Catherine Dunn moved their growing family from the town of Westport on the north side of Lake Mendota to the lush farming community of Fitchburg.
The balmy, for the second week in November, Wednesday seemed an ideal time to check with the Dunns, who were anxiously awaiting their corn crop to dry down so they could get to picking it.
Actually, brothers David and Donald, sons of now-83-year-old Vernon Dunn, who run their own farms some miles apart, both use corn pickers and store their ear corn in corncribs.
Although there are hundreds of corn pickers still in use across the state, they are few and far between in the heavy corn growing area from Dane County and south.
Most of the corn is not picked as a whole cob these days; it is combined with the big green, red and yellow machines one sees kicking up dust in the corn and soybean fields. The combines shell the kernels from the cobs – that are returned to the soil – and run through a dryer and stored in the big steel and concrete structures at country elevators and in steel grain bins on farms.
The Dunn brothers admitted they have not “gone modern” in their farming methods and seem to get along rather well with their old, but still very usable equipment.
At one time, the Dunn family was milking cows at five locations in the Fitchburg-Oregon area.
Nowadays, only David and his wife, Karen, are milking cows on their 128 acres in the town of Oregon. This is the farm that brothers Gerald and Vernon bought in 1952 and where Vernon raised his family. Donald farms the former Rowe farm that he bought in 1982. He sold the cows in 1997 and now raises steers.
David’s dairy herd is on the low end of the Wisconsin dairy herd scale with 26 cows milking – the average Wisconsin herd has 90 cows – but the family isn’t planning any expansion.
David explains that he still climbs the solid concrete silo and uses the “strong arm” method of throwing down the silage. And the 10-foot-high solid concrete silo that is used as an oats bin is old and certainly unique.
As the always gracious hosts, the Dunns invited me to renew my growing up memories and watch some corn picking at David’s farm.
Of course, Vernon drives the tractor – a 30-year-old John Deere 2840 diesel and the newest tractor on the farm – as he has done for decades.
While his gait has slowed considerably, Vernon can still wrestle the steering wheel and keep the picker on perfect track while looking backward to see that all is working well with the it.
The cob corn is hauled from the field by Karen, who positions the wagon next to the elevator, powered by a 1945 Allis Chalmers WC. David opens the bottom door, and the ears flow into the corncrib. High moisture means David has to occasionally use a steel bar to loosen sticky cobs from the wagon.
“My dad bought that tractor in 1945 when I was in the Army stationed at Manila in the Philippines,” Vernon remembers. “I was about 19 years old at the time.”
Forty years ago, every dairy farm had a corncrib, the kind with the drive-through dating back to the days when corn was shoveled by hand into the cribs on each side of the wagon.
With better technology – high-producing hybrid corn, combines and corn drying – and increasing farm size, the old corncribs became more or less obsolete on many farms. Dry corn without the cob moved to the steel bins on farms and central elevators and airtight silos for high moisture feed.
The old corncribs, sometimes with second floors where the oats and wheat were stored, were remodeled for other uses or torn down.
Not at Dunn farms.
David and Donald still do some things the “old way” on their farms: Picking corn is one of those throwback systems they use.
The tractors that David uses for farm work, not for show, include Allis Chalmers from 1945, 1949, 1954 and 1974; a 1951 Oliver; a 1949 Minneapolis Moline; and a 1958 John Deere. And a New Idea corn picker dates to the late 1970s; the company ceased making them in 1984.
Why the old corn picker? Why only 26 cows? Why so many old tractors?
That’s the way the Dunns like to farm, that’s what they enjoy – and perhaps why Vernon and nearly 90-year-old Gerald are still helping on the farm rather than sitting in nursing homes.
John F. Oncken is owner of Oncken Communications, a Madison-based agricultural information and consulting company. He can be reached at 608-222-0624 or e-mail him at jfodairy@chorus.net.
