Item 1 of 1
Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982
| Play this item |  Help |
|
|---|---|---|
| Choose Format | bandwidth/file Size | |
 |
Play | 56k or higher |
 |
Play | 12 megabytes |
 |
Play | 21 megabytes |
Item Title
The Harobed
Author/Creator
Narrator: Stewart, Fred
Fleischhauer, Carl
Purser, Margaret, interviewers.
Created/Published
July 08,1982
Notes
Fred Stewart operates a harobed to pick up and stack the hale baled the day before and then talks about the harobed.
In this video, Fred Stewart is using a harobed to pick up and stack the hay that Tex Nichols had baled the day before, which was documented in video selection <022>. This montage was created by intercutting Fred's last three runs of the day, including his final partial load.
The generic name for the harobed is "automatic bale wagon." The model shown here is manufactured by the Sperry-New Holland farm equipment company and costs from $25,000 to $30,000. Gordon Grey, who named it by spelling his daughter Deborah's name backward, invented the machine in the late 1900s. Grey and his partner Bill Wilson started a company in Lancaster, California, to market the machine, and the first models were built in the inventor's barn. The company moved to Fowler, California, but sold out to Sperry-New Holland in 1962. By then, the machine was well known in California and Nevada. Sperry-New Holland renamed it "Stackcruiser," but as Fred Stewart observes, the name harobed has stuck in the area of original use. (Information about the machine and its name was provided by Ivan Glick of the Sperry-New Holland Company in telephone conversations with this writer, August 14, 1984.)
Fred's optimistic assessment of the harobed's ease of operation is accurate, but fails to stress the amount of maintenance the machine needs. Annebet Muceus's story of the swather's bent rods and Tex Nichols's musings on the importance of listening to the sound of the baler suggest how much maintenance farm equipment may require. This footage omits one important shot -- the finished stack. Ranchers tend to make long, narrow stacks, whose shapes resemble those of the open stacks of the derrick era. One of the ranch's stacks is under a roof, but in Paradise Valley's arid climate, only minimal covering is needed.
Subject
Activities
Haying
Harobeds
Ethnography
Motion Pictures
Ninety-Six Ranch
Object Type
Medium
3/4 inch video
Language
English
Call Number
NV82-VT3
Digital ID
afc96ran v022
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.afc/afc96ran.v022