

He got a used tractor and 2 normal-sized unopened barrels of diesel, both manufactured in the 1970s, during the early 1990s privatization of Czechoslovak collective farms. We don’t use the tractor very much (it overheats after about an hour but that’s still more than enough time to plow our little field or haul a wagon) so one barrel is still more than half full. It takes 10+ years to empty a tank.
Looks like a PJ996 lantern battery whose top cover broke off. It’s probably carbon-zinc, in which case you can recover a decently big graphite rod from each cell.