Bushels of Fun

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Without fail, the golden cascade of kernels flowing from one of Bob Overmohle's engine-powered corn shellers captivates crowds at small tractor and engine shows throughout west-central Iowa.

'I really enjoy demonstrating the corn shellers because so many people have never seen the kernels removed from the cob that way,' Bob Overmohle explains as he loads ear corn into the top of his Sandwich sheller. The Carroll, Iowa, sheller collector has a passion for just about any thing related to corn processing - the old-fashioned way, that is.

Straight from the farm

As a kid growing up in the 1950s, Bob got plenty of experience growing and harvesting corn, and even hired out to neighbors where he received more specialized training. 'I worked for a neighbor who had a big Minneapolis-Moline corn sheller with an IH 350 Farmall to run it, and I detasseled corn for the Renze Brothers' seed company,' Bob explains.

Much more labor was involved with both the growing and harvesting of corn and its hybridization for seed back then, he adds, which is why he now knows so much about the 'hands-on' nature of corn equipment.

Bob's youthful experiences with corn eventually grew into a collecting passion that now includes hundreds of cloth seed-corn sacks from the 1940s and 1950s, husking tools, shelling tools, seed-corn drying racks, hand and engine-powered shellers, a two row picker and plenty of International Harvester Co. horsepower.

Along the way, however, the Overmohle family built a seasonal business detasseling corn for hybridization, and it was just plain, hard work. Bob, his wife, Judy, and their children contract-detasseled more than 20 acres of seed corn each year for many years. Their customers were several Carroll County seed-corn producers, including Renze Brothers. The Overmohles and their crew were well known for doing thorough work, which ensured high purity of the resultant hybrid seed crop. The contracts provided summer jobs for the kids and some extra income at home.

'It was wet, hard, hot and nasty work, even if the pay was good,' Bob says.

The Overmohle family's detasseling days are over, and Bob now enjoys picking and shelling corn for wildlife feed as much as he likes collecting, showing and demonstrating vintage tools of the trade.

Excess baggage

Labels on seed corn sacks and his relationships with many of the seed-corn growers first whet Bob's appetite for collecting corn-related farm items. Bob has collected cloth seed-corn sacks for about 16 years, and while he's always on the lookout for sacks that originated in Carroll County he owns sacks from many national brands such as Funks, Northrup King and Crows.

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