When it was threshing time on the prairie

It’s now closing in on the end of what used to be called threshing season.

Until the 1960s when diversified farming died, “small grain” crops such as oats, wheat, rye and barley were harvested beginning in late July and early August. Depending on the weather, the season sometimes lasted into September. Today, there are very few fields of oats and wheat in Kendall County, and none of barley or rye that I’ve seen. Since there is little on-farm need for those grains these days, planting and harvesting small grains has been virtually eliminated.

In the early 1950s, though, my father and our neighbors all ran diversified farms. We raised pigs and chickens all year round, fed feeder cattle during the winter and even had a milk cow or two.

Farmers need oats, both the grain and for the straw left over from the harvesting process. Oats were taken to the grain elevator and ground into coarse flour and when mixed with water, or sometimes raw milk from our cow (if there was some left over), produced “slop,” which we fed to the hogs (yes, farmers really did slop the hogs back in those days). Oat straw was used as bedding for livestock in winter and also in the chicken house for nests and chicken house floor covering.

Farmers planted oats in the spring using an endgate seeder, an ingenious machine that broadcast oat seed on prepared fields. The seeder fit on the back of a flared wagon box in place of the endgate. A gear and chain from the back wagon wheel provided the power to the hopper-fed spinner that broadcast the oat seed on prepared ground.

When crops ripened starting in late summer, my dad harvested them with our Allis-Chalmers combine. The oats were stored in a special second floor bin in the corn crib while the oat straw left in the field after harvesting was raked into rows and baled. The straw bales were stored in the barn’s haymow.

Except for being towed behind a tractor, our old combine worked pretty much like the big, modern, self-propelled machines we see working the fields nowadays. Oats could be harvested standing in the field, since the combine had a built-in sickle bar that could mow the stalks down. Most of the time, however, my father cut the oats first using a sickle bar mower hitched to our tractor. After cutting, the oat stalks were raked into windrows. When they had dried, he harvested the oats with a special rotary pickup device fitted to the combine.

As the combine moved down the raked rows, the cut stalks were carried into the machine on a wide canvas belt. The machinery separated the grain from the stalks and carried it up into a bin on the side of the combine. The stalks were exhausted out the rear of the machine, where a spiller spread them. Periodically, the combine’s bin was emptied into a truck or wagon, and hauled to the crib where a portable grain elevator carried the grain up to the oat bin on the crib’s second floor.

Before the invention of the combine (originally known as the combined harvester), getting small grains from field to storage was a much more difficult, labor-intensive, time-consuming business. But since small grains were vital for the survival of farms back then, it was a necessary task for all its difficulty.

Farmers developed a complicated cooperative system to harvest small grains – from the 1870s through the 1940s, it was the only way most farmers could afford to stay in business – using three major pieces of equipment for the harvest. The first was a binder, a machine cheap enough to be owned by individual farmers that cut standing stalks and then bound the stalks into bundles. The two other necessities were a threshing machine and a steam engine to power the threshing machine. Both of these large pieces of equipment were so costly that farmers purchased them jointly in cooperative groups called threshing rings.

When harvest season arrived, individual farmer members of local threshing rings used their binders to begin the harvest. Oats, rye, wheat and the other small grains were cut and bound into 10-inch diameter bundles by the farmers’ binders. The bundles were then stacked by hand in shocks of seven or so bundles each to dry in the fields. Water was kept off the grain in the shocks by constructing ingenious water-repellant roofs using grain bundles, a skill that disappeared from the farming landscape with the advent of combine harvesters.

When the grain was dry, the threshing machine and its steam engine began making the rounds of the farms in the threshing ring. At each farm, the members of the ring, each of whom owned shares in the ring’s equipment, showed up to help harvest each other’s grain. Because threshing machines used, for their day, advanced technology, individuals with special skills were appointed operate the most complicated equipment. The separator man, who operated the threshing machine, and the engineer, who ran the steam engine, both received extra pay because of their specialized skills.

In the July 29, 1899, minutes of the East Oswego Threshing Ring, it was noted the ring was governed by an elected president and secretary and that an appointed committee checked out the ring’s mechanical equipment. The East Oswego Ring consisted of 22 men in 1899. Each man received a wage of 15 cents per hour, money raised by charging each farmer a set fee per bushel of grain threshed. If all went well, each farmer’s wage offset the cost of threshing his own grain. Threshing was done between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. daily with one hour off for the noon dinner, which was cooked in turn by each farmer member’s wife.

Although diminished, Kendall County’s small grain harvest still takes place this time of year, harking back to the days of threshing rings and the agricultural social and economic system of which they were part. It’s a bit of our history we can watch unfold in real time every year.

Looking for more local history?

Visit http://historyonthefox.wordpress.com/