Equipment Fires

About three years ago, the day before the predicted first frost of the season, Bledsoe County farmer and retired agriculture teacher Bobby Loyd was baling late-fall hay with plans to wrap it for silage.

- Hope Ellis-Ashburn

On this day, he mowed until around dinner when he shut the tractor off for a short meal break. As he settled back into his seat to pick up where he had left off, the tractor wouldn’t start. “I thought that was odd,” he says. But, looking to get back to work, he jumped it off with his pickup truck, hooked it to the baler and started baling.

The oddity still in the back of his mind, he decided to check and see if the tractor would start if he turned it back off. “I baled maybe 15 bales and shut it off,” he says. “This time, when I jumped it off the battery was so low that I couldn’t even get the power takeoff to engage,” he says.

While While no longer plentiful, family farms dating back multiple generations still populate the scenic valley that I call home. From my farm, it's easy to think of a member of our farming community whose unique expertise lends itself well to the column topics I seek to cover. In each issue, I'll spotlight farming operations whose practices aren't only applicable across the country but that you can take and make use of for your own farm.

- Hope Ellis-Ashburn

Thinking it was an issue with the battery, he went into town and purchased a new one. Then, after replacing the battery, he was able to operate another 30 minutes after which he pulled up, stopped and got on another tractor so that he could begin bunching hay readying it for wrapping at daylight the next morning.