"He can't do that!"

     There was the sound of a chair being pushed violently into a file cabinet. "Have you seen this? Has anybody seen this?" It was the voice of Homer Luttringer, director of advertising and PR for the New Holland Machine Co. (actually Sperry New Holland by then, late 1960s) who appeared in the door looking left and right for anybody who had seen "This."
    "This" was a product brochure for the John Deere Haybine. "They can't do this!" Luttringer said. "They can't!"
    And he was right. John Deere could, of course, develop and bring to market a machine to cut hay crops, crimp the stems and lay the conditioned product in a neat row behind the machine, a feat that New Holland had pulled off a few years earlier. But John Deere could not call their machine a "Haybine." The Haybine was one of those perfectly named machines, like the first Caterpillar tractor, or the Dodge Caravan (it's a car, it's a van). The Haybine described exactly what the machine did, and the name was so unique that it could become a registered trademark. And so New Holland had the name Haybine ®ed and ^TMed to the full extent of intellectual property rights law.
    While the New Holland Haybine was a mower-conditioner, anybody else who came up with a mower-conditioner would have to come up with their own name. And what most of them came up with was mower-conditioner, popularly known by the catchy moniker "mo-co."
    I was reminded of this incident while reading Coop, a new book by Michael Perry. Perry is a freelance writer and humorist, who recently began farming on 37 acres in rural Wisconsin. He talks at one point about his adventures with a John Deere haybine - no capital "H", no ®, no ^TM, and I could hear Homer Luttringer's voice roaring down the years, "He can't do that!"
    To me, a tiny transgression in a very nice book. Lancaster Farming readers may find much of the material a bit Farming 101, but Perry's impressions as he reacquaints himself with farm life might help you see and appreciate the everyday things around you in a new light. I'll talk more about Coop in tomorrow's blog.
 
    State ag department budgets are being slashed right and left, some down to basic core services, some even farther than that. But a few departments are holding their own. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres talked to departments from New Hampshire to Virginia to get an up-to-date picture of what's going on. His article is in our current edition.

    Do you really need to know what the farmer is saying?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_05SslcVjgE