Your hobby is bigger than you think; perhaps even bigger than your wife thinks! In fact, your hobby helps fuel your community.

Here’s how it works. If you go to old iron shows, or if you’re an exhibitor at old iron shows, you help that club produce a bigger and better show. Whether you’re paying admission at the gate, buying a pork burger or setting up a display, your very presence contributes to the bottom line.

And who goes to just one show a season? Nobody. If you load up the pickup and head down the road to a show, chances are good that you’ll do business with the locals when you arrive: buy gas, get a room, hit the convenience store for on-the-road needs. Others traveling with you may do a bit of shopping at local shops. At the end of the day, there may be a meal at a local restaurant, and so on. Your hobby is a shot in the arm for businesses and communities.

And don’t overlook the people who feed you at the show. For instance, at the 2011 Midwest Old Threshers Reunion in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, the Boy Scouts sold 67 dozen homemade cinnamon rolls. The Pork Producers made more than 8,000 sandwiches. Local churches produced enough beef and noodles, mashed potatoes and pie to feed an army. Proceeds from those activities filter down to support everything from local projects to international stewardship.

You may not think it adds up to much. Economic development experts know otherwise. That’s why they make sure promotional materials and online resources feature museum collections and annual shows. Check out websites for your local chamber of commerce or county economic development organization. If your club’s show isn’t featured, it should be. If the museum you support isn’t included in a list of local attractions, it should be. People who travel are looking for this information: Give them what they want.

And the next time you find yourself on the wrong end of a conversation about the newest addition to your collection, run the economic development argument up the flagpole. It may just buy you enough time to seek shelter from a rolling pin! FC

Like Johnny Cash, “I’ve been everywhere, man” and I’m here to report that the old iron hobby is alive and well. Visits to shows and museums in the past year have taken me from one coast to the other. What have I found? People busily, happily engaged in preserving a way of life.

Talk up this hobby for very long and you’re sure to run into somebody worried near to death over the shortage of young people among collector ranks. Sometimes fear runs on autopilot. What I’ve seen in the past year suggests an infusion of new blood. A certain segment of the population seems to be escaping the ruckus of modern times by slipping into old clothes and old iron.

New displays and buildings are popping up at shows all over the country. The Connecticut Antique Machinery Club unveils a new sawmill exhibit this fall. Way out west at Antique Powerland in Brooks, Ore., plans are underway for a museum to house the group’s drag saw collection. At the Mid-Michigan Old Gas Tractor Association’s show in Oakley, a new building provides shelter for the veneer mill and sawmill, and seating for onlookers. At Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, new signs dotting the Old Threshers show grounds explain vintage tractors and equipment to those new to the hobby.

These are not the easiest times to grow and expand, but enthusiasts are working with renewed vigor and remarkable resourcefulness (in some cases, the words sly, crafty and wily come to mind) to achieve their goals. Shows are becoming more family friendly, new ideas are getting a second look and dusty old rules are being aired out. Clubs are finding that when it comes to expansion projects, investments pay dividends. New projects bring new crops of volunteers and visitors.

At a recent show, I visited with three generations of one family. Each man collected engines; each was an active and valued participant in the family hobby. In the steam engine area, a trio of engineers – granddad and two teenage grandchildren – bent my ear about their shared hobby. Over on the field, a young man drove a tractor from his grandfather’s collection while his grandmother presided over her display of tractor and implement seats. Generation gap? Not where there’s old iron! FC

Those who treasure the past know the challenge: It’s one thing to find relics from another era; altogether another to learn their story. But old iron remains almost defiantly mute, and those with firsthand knowledge to impart are fast disappearing. Solid resources are hard to come by, which is why we are particularly pleased to present a special edition containing a retrospective of Sam Moore’s columns for Farm Collector.

With us almost from the beginning of the magazine in 1998, Sam has written on a stunningly diverse array of topics. Impeccably researched and richly detailed, his columns breathe life into traditional farm practices long forgotten, fill in gaps on long defunct manufacturers and clear the fog surrounding actual use of long forgotten machinery, implements and devices. (He’s also a prolific blogger: Check out Sam’s blogs at www.FarmCollector.com.) 

The product of a four-generation family farm in Beaver County, Pa., Sam has been an apt student of farm life. I like to picture him as a boy, doing chores on the farm, knowing when to keep out of the way and when to get in the middle of things, asking questions and filing away the answers for future reference.

Sam left the farm after high school and found a life’s career elsewhere, but his passion for farm life never faded. In addition to a modest collection of tractors and implements, he’s built an enormous reference library of books and publications, catalogs and sales literature, vintage magazines and manuals. Those form a sturdy foundation for the columns he writes monthly for Farm Collector – a selection of which is showcased in Harvesting Heritage: 150 Years on the American Farm. 

In these pages you’ll find everything from directions for setting up perfect check-rows to wry recollections of truck-swallowing mud roads, the stories behind early manufacturers to making hay. The lore he shares is priceless. “Very few Americans today have even a remote connection to our farming heritage,” Sam notes, “and the people who still do are vanishing.” At Farm Collector, we consider Sam one of the leading resources in the hobby. We are honored to work with him, and thrilled to be able to share some of his best work with you in Harvesting Heritage. For ordering details, click here: Make space on your bookshelf for this one. FC 

During a drive west across Kansas in early May, the sight of green fields along the interstate nearly brought tears to my eyes. It’s not that I have some kind of weird soft spot for farm crops (though I do, actually, if we’re talking wheat ready to harvest). No, the emotion was fallout from a book I’d just read about the Dust Bowl years.

In The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, author Timothy Egan recounts the utter devastation of a six-year drought on the Great Plains and its people in the 1930s.

This disaster – which displaced thousands of people, turned cities into ghost towns and affected 100 million acres of land – was created by a perfect storm of stupidity, greed and cyclical weather phenomena. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression, everything that could go wrong on the Plains did – all at once, and over and over again, for nearly a decade.

As I read the book, I began to see the advent of mechanized farm power in a different light. In the late 1920s, the tractor that made increased production possible was the same tool used to destroy a fragile ecosystem on the arid Great Plains. Tractors, of course, were not the central demon of the Dust Bowl tragedy. In fact, many homesteaders of the era had yet to abandon their workhorses. Nonetheless, the wild optimism and faith in new technology that marked the early years of the last century now rings in my mind with a tone more cautionary than celebratory.

Among the readers of Farm Collector, the Dust Bowl story comes as no revelation. More than a few of you lived through the worst hard time; others learned of it from parents and grandparents. We’d love to hear your stories: Send them to us, and we’ll share them in the magazine and on our website, www.FarmCollector.com.

Need a little inspiration? Read Delbert Trew’s column on grain hauling equipment in the years immediately following the Dust Bowl. It captures familiar themes in farm country: resilience, resourcefulness and impossibly green fields … exactly the kind of thing that makes a grown woman cry. FC

It’s summer and the living is easy … unless you’re a member of the old iron community, in which case the pace is approaching full-scale frenzy. Finishing projects, planning road trips, volunteering at shows – it’s the time of year when dance cards fill up in a heartbeat. And that is exactly where your friends at Gas Engine Magazine can lend a hand.

Nope, they won’t strap engines on to a trailer and they won’t help with final reassembly after the paint dries – but they have put together a dandy of a book that will give you an in-depth look at a very fine museum: The Coolspring (Pa.) Power Museum.

Created by a group of passionate engine enthusiasts, the Coolspring museum is a world-class collection of rare and historically significant antique engines. As the focus of Gas Engine Magazine’s Preservations Series, Coolspring, Discovering America’s Finest Antique Engine Museum takes you through the best of the best in this unique museum.

Housed in 20 buildings, the Coolspring collection includes more than 250 engines. Singling out 40 of those engines, this new book gives the reader a cross-section of the museum collection and also serves as a tour guide – because after you read this book, you will want to visit the museum. A map and an index of the collection team up to ensure that your visit to Coolspring will be time well spent, indeed.

One particular beauty of the Coolspring museum is the fact that the engines there are fully operational. Demonstrating the purpose for which they were designed, these historic relics capture a unique era in a meaningful way. Maybe you can’t make the museum today, but this new book from Gas Engine guarantees an up-close look that ought to keep you engaged until you can pencil in a trip of your own.

 Information on each of the 40 engines featured was provided by museum founder Paul Harvey, curator Preston Foster and president Clark Colby. Gas Engine editor Christian Williams edited the work, and you’ll appreciate his firm grip on the wheel.

If you’ve visited the Coolspring museum, you’ll particularly appreciate the selection this book contains. And if you’ve not yet been, this book will whet your appetite and beckon you to come by for a closer look. Whether you’re an armchair tourist or a road warrior, this book will be a fine addition to your collection! FC 

To order your copy of Coolspring, Discovering America's Finest Antique Engine Museum , visit the Farm Collector store by clicking here .