Reprinted with permission from The Miami Republican Newspaper.
Submitted by Bob Harrington, Box 389, Paola, Kansas 66071.
It was an old-fashioned threshing bee minus the runaways and the
big harvest crew dinner. Everything else was the same as if it had
been taken from the pages of the 1930s.
An old 1926 10-20 four-cylinder McCormick-Deering tractor purred
away pulling a 150′ belt which turned the cylinders to an early
1930 model McCormick-Deering separator.
Bundles of oats were tossed into the mouth of the separator. A
chain operated feeder fed the bundles into rapidly moving arms
which cut the string tie from the bundles and spread the stalks of
grain going into the giant stomach of the old separator.
As the stalks of grain moved into the machine a cylinder beat
the grain from the stalks and a huge blower blew the straw from the
grain.
The straw went flying out the blower and the grain was augered
from the bowels of the machine.
Dale Hansen was threshing the oats he had raised on his farm,
which is located a mile south of 327th Street on Cold Water Springs
Road, north of Drexel.
Hansen, a retired machinist, and his friend, Fred Cohu, Olathe,
had restored the old thresher and tractor as a hobby. They have 11
other old tractors ranging from 1925 to 1932 models which they have
restored or are in the process of restoring.
In addition they have a second separator which is nearly ready
to go.
Hansen planted some 10 to 15 acres of oats. He and Cohu used a
1928 M20 regular Farmall to pull a 1930 model McCormick-Deering
binder to cut the oats and bind them into bundles with binding
twine.
Cohu said the binder missed tying only one bundle. ‘That was
the first one,’ he recalled.
After the field was cut and bundled, the two men put the bundles
into shocks in the time-honored way of heads up, cut stalks to the
ground and leaned together. The small shocks allow the grain to
fully mature and dry before going to the ‘thresher’ or
grain separator.
‘In the old days,’ said one of the neighbors sitting
around watching the separator do its work, ‘we used to stack
the bundles and put ’em through the sweat’ before we
threshed.’
There were two schools of thought on preparation of the grain
before it arrived at the threshing machine. One thought the grain
matured better and stayed brighter by putting the bundles into big
stacks rather than the small shocks. The shockers felt it a waste
of time to have to haul the bundles to the stacks and wait for the
grain to go through the sweat.’
Either way the bundles had to be hauled from the field.
Hansen and Cohu loaded the bundle wagons with the oats and
pulled the wagons by a tractor to a large metal shed to be stored
until threshing time.
A tractor was used to pull the bundle wagons to the separator
instead of a team of horses hence no runaways. However, a pair of
small red mules were used to pull the grain wagon from the
separator to the storage barn. The oats will be used to feed the
mules and some 90 head of cattle on the Hansen farm.
Hansen said, ‘We’ve got another farm in Nebraska, We
used the income off it to keep this operation going.’
The separator had been ‘dug in’ and leveled in the
traditional manner, so the belt could be tightened by the tractor.
Of course, the tractor wheels were blocked, and as was the case
with many of the old-time tractors, steam boiled off the water in
the radiator as it purred away.
A threshing machine differs from a combine in that the grain
must be cut and hauled to the machine rather than taking the
machine to the field, cutting and separating in one operation as
does the combine.
Hansen plans to have another day of threshing soon. When he
picks a date, the public will be invited to see this operation
which was common 40 or more years ago.
