Pfister’s four-row corn pickers were first used on the 1945 crop.
acres in addition to the plants for handling and storing the seed produced. He annually leases about 5,000 acres of land from farmers in the area which is added to his own seed producing acres.
Lester is noted for his search for new aids to agriculture, as well as seed corn production. In seed came detasseling machines from his shops, which enabled the detasselers to ride instead of walk through the fields, but the better reason was to get them up where they could see and remove the tassel much easier than was possible when walking. Then came the combination four-row corn pickers, suited for Lester's flat land, and which doubled the bushels per day. We believe these machines from his own shops, made by welding two ordinary two-row pickers together with the various changes and additions, were the first to be successfully used anywhere. To this in recent years, Lester's inventive son Jerry added a corn sheller, so that four rows can be picked and shelled in the same operation. Another gadget Pfister made without a pattern to guide him, was spraying rigs to combat the corn borer and insect menace. When drought caused severe crop losses, Lester Pfister rigged up a two-motor plane for seeding clouds with dry ice and tried rain making for two seasons. Doubting the feasibility of this, he quickly swung his attention to field irrigation, and has an inbred field completely ready to provide artificial