Threshing Memories: Let’s Talk Rusty Iron

By Sam Moore
Published on July 27, 2009
article image
from Successful Farming Magazine
An idealized rendering of a threshing scene from the cover of the July 1933 issue of Successful Farming Magazine.

Well, I celebrated (if “celebrate” is the proper word) another birthday in August (OK, I attained the ripe old age of 76), and I’m waxing nostalgic about the good old days.

In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s a common failing among us “old geezers.”

When I was a kid on the farm during the 1940s, we grew corn, oats, wheat and hay. That was the standard order of crop rotation and Dad taught me how to remember it by using the word cow followed by hay (cows eat hay, right?). The hay was mostly a clover and timothy mixture and was put into my uncle’s barn with the hayfork.

The grain harvest was the big deal of the harvest season. First wheat and then oats were cut with a McCormick-Deering ground-driven grain binder pulled by the Farmall F-30 tractor. My grandfather Moore, who we all called “Nandad,” usually rode the binder to adjust the levers and dump the sheaves in rows so they could be shocked by my father and uncle and, sometimes, a hired man.

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