More from the tractor seat

Farmers all know this, but perhaps other people don’t: John Deere (the person) never built a tractor. He lived from 1804 to 1886, before the motorized farming age. Nevertheless he arguably was a key figure in farming mechanization, since his company first manufactured self-scouring cast-steel plows, originally horse-drawn, that till and turn the soil. This was an early part of a transition from pastoral farming techniques to modern mechanized farming, with all of its simultaneous benefits and problems.

Even though our tractor (which we use for mowing, not plowing) can take a much sharper turn than a car, our four-wheel drive tractor doesn’t turn quite as easily as the old narrow-wheel row-crop tractors. Ours does has the right- and left-hand brakes that help the tractor pivot, but this is more effective on plowed soil than on the wildflower meadows we mow—the pivot can “turf” the vegetation down to bare soil.

So the pattern I choose when I mow meadows minimizes the turns the tractor has to make. Sometimes this pattern is a series of ever-narrowing concentric circles around the field, spiraling down until just the middle is left. This is the way we mow the lawn here, but that is with a zero-turn walk-behind mower. With the tractor those last few stripes require a series of three-point turns, or backing up over some distance.

With some of the fields I instead apply a lesson I learned from watching a Zamboni (tm) dress ice at a rink. The first pass goes up the center then loops around one side, and then the oval loops—each is the same size—keep moving across the rink until all the ground is covered. At either end the ground is mowed multiple times, but the tractor never needs to stop, reverse, or do a three-point turn.