When I was a kid, my uncle and dad would usually cultivate their corn, a practice that has waned over the decades with the popularity of no-till practices. They had a four-row, front-mount cultivator they mounted on our John Deere 4010 tractor and then later they bought a four-row, three-point cultivator.

When I was a teenager, I had two tractor-related chores I could accomplish by myself. One was to move round bales of alfalfa hay back to the farm place with our 4010 and three-point bale mover from the other side of the farm, and the other was to cultivate corn with the same tractor and the three-point cultivator.

As an inexperienced tractor operator, cultivating corn was way more difficult than moving hay bales. If you got off a little while cultivating corn, you were destroying multiple rows of corn plants very quickly.

Flat fields were easier to cultivate obviously, but any field with a side-hill was way more difficult, especially with terraces and point rows. And nearly everything we farmed was rolling hills.

One time I was cultivating corn on what was my grandparents' farm. Part of the farm was developed into a housing development in the 1970s, and part of the farm my family got back in the 1980s as the developer could not make the balloon payment on a 10-year land contract. I drove through a slight ditch, and the ground had washed out and the entire back end of the tractor fell into a deep hole.

This was in the days before cellphones, so I had to walk to a nearby house to use the phone to get a ride home. My dad and uncle must have pulled the tractor out.

In addition, they also had a three-point mounted implement they called a "go devil." This was essentially a row-crop cultivator with metal shields to protect the small corn plants. I vaguely remember them using this to cultivate corn.

We switched to 30-inch rows several years ago now and the "go devil" and three-point cultivator sit in the tree line unused. The old front-mount cultivator of the 4010 got cut up for scrap iron when we moved to our current farm in 1997.

Our old "go devil" is painted mainly John Deere green, but the back part of it is white. I'm not sure what the brand it is, I couldn't find any model/serial tags on the vintage implement.

From Googling the phrase "go devil," I found that some people online called it "go dig" instead of "go devil." Someone on one of the websites said the real name of this field operation is a lister cultivator.

We have an old two-row John Deere planter that belonged to my grandpa, which we used over the years to plant sweet corn. My dad calls it a "loose-ground lister." The planter/lister is only two rows and the "go dig" is four rows, so obviously they were never used together.

We always referred to it as a "go devil" not "go dig." I had never heard of this term until reading it online. Of course, considering it has probably been a good 40 years since it's been used on our farm, my knowledge of this implement is extremely limited.

Some people on the sites said they would have two "go devils." One would be to throw the soil "out" from the row and then the other one would throw the soil "in" back toward the row.

This was on horse-drawn "go devils" from reading the many comments. Later versions could do both, apparently, thus having to not purchase two of these implements.

An interesting thing I noticed when reading about this field operation was that many of the comments were from people in Nebraska and South Dakota. I don't have any proof of this, but it appears that much of the use of this implement was centered in the western Corn Belt.

In addition, some commenters on the websites I saw referred to this implement as a "corn sled." From the location of these folks, people from Kansas and southward -- such as Oklahoma and Texas -- seemed to call it a "corn sled."

I had never heard this term before reading about this cultivating implement on these websites. "Corn sled" makes my mind think of going sledding in the corn stalks field in the winter.

Do you have any knowledge of "go devils," "go digs" or "corn sleds?" Please let me know your stories about this lost implement, and we will use your comments in an upcoming column.

Russ Quinn can be reached at Russ.Quinn@dtn.com

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