My first payed job was stooking 40 acres of wheat.
I didn't do too good, my stooks all blew down overnight. The next morning dad got up before sunrise and went and restooked the whole field so that I would get paid. He never told me what he had done. I learned about it years later.
Stooking was an art form. One would pick up two bundles by the strings, hold them close together in front of you and then swing them down into the stubble so that they ended up butts to the ground and the tops leaning against each other. In an upside down V.
A bit of force was needed to get them to bite into the dirt a bit to stabilize them and to make the tops mesh together a bit to stabilize the tops. Then one would take two more and plant them in the same fashion, at right angles to the first two, and so on up to ten bundles per stook. Most people made a six bundle stook. One could make a four bundle stook but the more bundles in a stook the less work it was to load them when it was time to thresh them.
I lacked the streangth to plant them solidly enough. And those strings tore my hands up something fierce. My hands were raw for days.
Those stooks made super duck hunting blinds. All one had to do was to make a super sized stook with ten or more bundles planted in a circle.
Dad ran a thrashing machine until 1965 when he bought a Gleaner A combine, the first self propelled combine in the area. Like this one.
Dave Befus had the first combine a pull type affair that was broke down more then it worked.
I wasn't old enough to load bundles or work on the binder or the thresher but I loved to watch them work.
Watching the tying mechanism on the binder tie bundles was fascinating, it had a big curved needle that ran the twine around the bundle.
The thresher had a device to count the bushels of wheat as it was threshed.
It was a large, roughly square trough on a balance. The weight was supposed to be set to weigh one bushel.
When the weight reached a set limit the trough would overbalance dumping the contents into an auger and tripping a counter. Then it would right itself and start filling again. I used to watch it do that for hours.
I still remember the sound of that thrasher. It had a huge blower at the back to blow the cleaned straw into a pile, that blower howled like jet engine. It was loud.
The bushel counter is the mechanism on the top of the machine, in front of the guy standing on top the thresher.
The blower is inside the round housing at the bottom rear of the thresher.
It was a paddle wheel affair that threw as much as blew the straw.
Kinda like a snow blower on steroids.
Dad's thresher looked exactly like the one in the photo.
Dad used a tractor to run the thresher. He had only one tractor and no horses but the neighbor had a team of horses so they worked together at harvest time. The neighbor, Howard Price, would use his team of horses to gather the bundles and bring them to the thresher, the older boys helped load the wagon with bundles and dad ran the thresher, using his tractor, and fed bundles into the thresher.
Each man had a wagon so the field team would swap a loaded wagon for an empty one so that everyone kept busy, except for me, I just watched.
And rode on the load of bundles, or chased mice that had been exposed when the bundles were loaded.
Fun times. There is no better life for a kid. Lots of fresh air, fresh food from the garden and from hunting and lots of interesting things to see and do. It was my favorite time of year, and still is.
And I still love being involved in the harvest, only now I do my part and work as hard as anyone. I've spend a lot of nights hauling grain and running grain dryer, simultaneously. Or running combine.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Red Bullets
The older members will remember the times before the farmers were using combines to harvest their crops. Up until the mid 1950's quite of farmers were still using a piece of horse or tractor drawn equipment called a binder to cut their crops. Then they would stand up the bundles of grain in the fields, like shown in the picture. Then they would haul in the grain and run the bundles through the thrashing machine. The fields used to look so beautiful in fall time.
My best memory and the point of this post was to say that when the fields used to be in stooks the sharptail grouse would come in huge flocks to roost on the stooks and eat the grain. I remember seeing flocks of a couple hundred sharptail sitting on stooks. They were very wary grouse. You couldn't get too close or they would fly. I remember my Dad and I going out and shooting 20 (daily limit 10 each then) with his 22 from 100 yards away. In about 10 minutes.
I don't think a person can see those big flocks anymore. Maybe there are in some rural areas. Anyone remember the big flocks or maybe still seeing them?
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