"This Ground is working up nice. I hope there aren't any wet spots".

Picture by Gordy Schultz. Product: 1/64 Baker 7520 with an Ertl John Deere 2200 field cultivator.

Down on John Schomburg's Farm

John Schomburg's 1/64 projects always impressive collectors for their like detail.  For the first time John is putting his custom pieces to work on a full size display.  While most of the details of the display are still under wraps John has allowed The Toy Tractor Times to feature a few spring planting pictures for the April Down on the Model Farm.  The entire display won top honors at the Ripon, Wisconsin Toy Show in March.  The full display is a joint effort featuring  1/64 farms built by John Schomburg,  Bill Eberle and Tim Grube. With these talented builders working together look for one massive 1/64 countryside from this team at the 2003 National Farm Toy Show.

In order to keep big equipment running a full pace it is often important to have plenty of fuel. On this big farm the re-fills are done right in the field. 

John's farm fleet includes a custom Case 4994. John started with a Baker 4994 kit that is sold with Case International decals. John did allot of work customizing this kit.  The 400 hp 4994 is a perfect match for Jason Jeffers 46ft scratch built disk.

John customized a Scale Models New Holland 4wd to create a blue Buhler-Versatile 4245 (425 hp). Early Buhler 4wds remained New Holland blue to use up blue parts at the factory.  John added a clear window cab, lights and flasher bars as well as large flotation duals. The 4245 is pulling a 50 1/2 foot DMI field cultivator and crumbler John built from plastic resin in 2001.

John is planting display acres corn crop with a 24 row Kinze 3700 planter.  John spent many hours building this impressive planter with as much detail as possible. The planter is made from plastic resin.  John choose to team his planter with a New Holland 9384 (270 hp) made by Scale Models. Like the Buhler-Versatile above John added a clear window cab, lighting detail and for planting a large rear mounted chemical tank to hold starter fertilzer.

Potato farming is an area that particularly interests John.  He scratched built two Harriston potato planters from plastic resin for his display farm.  The planters are 8 row units and are pulled by customized John Deere 8420 tractors with additional lights, gps and mirrors.  The 8420's are also equipped chemical tanks and have a widened wheel tread.  

Here we see the Harriston being filled with seed potato's.  Because the Harriston is such a large planter a bin-piler is used to fill it. Bin-Pilers are normally used to pile potato's in cold storage. John built the piler because farms in his area of Wisconsin use the piler to unload live bottom trucks into the high sided Harriston planters 

Real Harriston planters at work in Plainfield Wisconsin.

TTT April 2003 Page 8

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