Gale Ritter must not have any allergies.
Wednesday afternoon, during a brief break from cutting corn half a mile east of town, he spoke clearly, without even a hint of sinus congestion.
That wouldn’t have been much of an observation if he had just climbed from an air-conditioned, enclosed cab that’s standard for combines these day. He didn’t.
Ritter is a throwback, in all the good ways, to how farming was done 50 years ago.
His combine is a 1963 three-row Gleaner — no cab and with an aluminum scoop shovel at hand to distribute grain in the bin to keep it from spilling over.
The combine chugs along, just fast enough to cut 10 acres a day in the 45-acre field nestled against Rock Creek. The soil, deep and rich, helped overcome meager rainfall to produce 50 bushels an acre. Few other fields in the area did as well.
“I don’t know how it did that,” in the face of one of the most severe dry and hot spells Allen County has seen since the 1950s. “The soybeans are still looking pretty good, too,” although Ritter fears the ongoing siege of inhospitable weather will be too much for them to recover, even if a shower or two did materialize.
His vintage combine isn’t lonely in Ritter’s machine shed. Other equipment, including a six-row John Deere planter, is a little long in the tooth.
He keeps all fit and ready for field work with mechanical abilities he’s honed since he took to farming on his own a mile up Rock Creek from the field he’s combining this week in 1961, with wife Mary Ann by his side then and now.
Ritter’s only concession to age — he’s nearing 81 — is that he’s turned much of the homeplace farm ground over to son-in-law Paul Meiwes.
But don’t shed any tears, Ritter isn’t about to retire to a rocking chair.
“I don’t have a schedule” for retiring, he said, minutes after giving an appraisal of another part of his farm operation.
He has 15 cows and 12 calves that prefer rural water to that stagnating in a pond, Ritter said with an appreciative smile.
“I’ve also been haying them for about a month,” he said, result of pasture grass put to dormancy by the weather.
FOR THE RECORD Ritter’s corn not only is making 50 bushels an acre, but also is testing well at 56.8 pounds to the bushel — the standard is 56 — but it is a tad dry at 11.7 percent moisture. Aflatoxin, the bogeyman that has darted from field to field this year, mostly skipped his.
