Milking Cows

Grampa's stantion barn. Will Farm Show barn. How It Works calf barn.


Lely, Another Lely, another Lely?



Videos:





Big farm in Saudi Arabia

How it's made - MILK

How It's Made: Milk

Automatic milking machine and other stuff

Quick tour of the milkhouse

Lost Manufacturing

GE

Steve's post
DeKalb's 2015 closure
In Illinois 1962 had 15 plants employing over 13k people

Chicago Bakeries

this Butternut (the one I've already done? (yes: )) article lists the other four bakeries. Plus Entenmann's 

1938 Aerial Photo from ILHAP

The original Wonder Bread factory was on the southwest corner of Diversey and Lakewood. In 2011 it was converted to eleven luxury townhouses. (Curbed) In general, the resolution of the old aerial photos is not good enough to see tracks. But you can see the Chicago & Evanston tracks that are running up Lakewood where they cross Diversey.

The newer Wonder Bread plant. Ramon's post.

IH

East Moline combine plant

IH war promotion video includes footage of the Fort Wayne Works

Caterpillar

A 2015 video of its history.

During the mining boom a few years ago, the CEO of Caterpillar decided to build more plants so that he could meet that demand. Part of that expansion was to move the building of road graders from Decatur, IL to a plant down south so that Decatur could build more big mining trucks. Now that mining activity has collapsed, the Decatur plant no longer has the road construction option to help keep it active. So as part of its downsizing because the expansion was a very expensive mistake, Cat is moving some production from Aurora to Decatur. (Update: now I'm reading all production will be moved to other locations.)

Customer posting
Peoria posting
Lost Illinois posting (Aurora newspaper article and some comments)

Cotton Pickers

I have several posts on combines. Cotton pickers are worthy of at least one.

Big Tractor Power posted
Allis-Chalmers 622 Cotton Picker
Big Tractor Power Allis-Chalmers built cotton pickers through 1981.

Comment on above posting
John Deere has cornered the US market with their round bale picker.

Below are some "front side" pictures of what you see here from the back side of a IH 314 single row picker.

20140801 0125

Tractorholic posted four photos with the comment: "Antique and classic cotton pickers!"

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4

Screenshot, cotton

20150702 Joliet Iron Works Ruins

(Satellite)    (Facebooked as a comment, another comment)

My general notes on the Joliet Iron Works

Update: AJ Grigg shared a posting of an AbandonedRailLines link wtih the comment: "The Joliet Iron Works built rails and transported them via the adjacent (and still operational) Illinois Central line [Chicago & Alton when operational] (now CN). But within the ruins, there are also plenty of abandoned rail bridges and side tracks."

A Facebook video

ReconnectWithNature
[This has some historical photos as well]

Update: Several videos

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This video may help provide a context for the stills below. I should have pictures below of every sign in the video.

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Here is some drone footage of the site, but it may be more disorienting than helpful.

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Above is an overview of the first part of the Joliet Iron Works Ruins. I took a picture of each sign and then what the sign was in front of. I want to annotate a few satellite images with an arrow for each photo ruin to indicate where the photo was taken. But that is way too much work to do in the foreseeable future. So for now I post them simply in the order taken.