Heritage Harvest

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'When it came time to cut and shock the grain, we had a lot of help,' Bonita says. 'We relied on some of the elderly farmers here to tell us what they had done when they were kids.' Every farmer had his own way of setting shocks in the field. Many would take six bundles of oats and set them up in a north-south orientation, she says, allowing breezes to dry the grain more quickly.

Proper placement of the threshing machine was another challenge. The machine must be on level ground and the surrounding space must be ample enough to accommodate working horses and wagons, and creation of a straw pile.

To aid the movement of grain and straw through the threshing machine, the thresher is set up to be as level as possible width-wise. That helps distribute the grain and straw evenly across racks and screens inside the machine so it doesn't collect on one side. The back of the machine is set slightly lower than the front end. That way, gravity and fans help move straw through the machine and into the blower where it is discharged. When straw collects in the back of the machine, it can easily plug the blower. If that happens, someone must crawl into the thresher and dig out the straw, which can become very tightly packed. Depending on the site's slope, it's not unusual to remove dirt from underneath the back end of the machine so it sits in a small hollow.

'The second time we did it, it wasn't nearly as hard,' Bonita says. 'We use live tractor power to run the belts. The machines were often run with horse power in the old days, but we knew that wasn't a good option for us.'
Local collectors with vintage tractors are more than happy to be part of the threshing event. 'My nephew brought his tractor one year,' Dean says. 'Our neighbor supplied a tractor one year, and a young man from Sioux City just begs to be able to do that for us. He loves bringing his John Deere Model D.'

A number of teamsters bring draft horses and hayracks to haul bundles to the machine. Dean says the teamsters appreciate the opportunity to take part in the event. 'They can show off their teams and use them a little to do something different,' he says. 'They like being able to expose their teams to the noise and motion of the machine. It's a good thing for the horses to learn.'

A simple concept

Scottish engineer Andrew Meikle is credited with inventing the first thresher in about 1786. The machine was considered one of the key developments in the British Agricultural Revolution. In The Correspondence of the Right Honourable Sir John Sinclair, published in 1831, Sinclair described the threshing machine as 'unquestionably the most valuable implement that has been introduced into the practice of husbandry in the course of the last century. The saving of manual labour which it occasioned, and that of a very severe kind, is beyond calculation.'

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