Harvesting

Introduction

The 1940’s and 50’s were a time of transition in Iowa farming and I experienced much of the old and the new. I learned to drive a team of horses before I learned to drive a tractor. I got to see much of the transition from a farm life unchanged for a hundred years change enormously in a decade after WWII ended.

Our farm was typical of those around us though perhaps a little larger in acreage. We, like our neighbors, raised hogs and chickens, milked cows, and raised most of the food for all the animals. My father had two brothers who lived within a mile of our farm; one was north and one was south, all living on the west side of Hwy 65-69, the main route from Minneapolis to Kansas City. A fourth brother lived about three miles southeast of the brothers on Hwy 65-69.

The shared activities focused on three general areas, Threshing, Haymaking, and Corn Picking. Threshing involved not only the four McKee farms but some other neighborhood farms as well until the threshing machine was replaced by combines. Haymaking efforts were confined to the brothers on the highway while Corn Picking involved three of the four brothers.

Threshing

Tractor binder, shocks, tying mechanism, horse drawn binders at other farms; strange rain

“The process of cutting and gathering the crops from the field is called harvesting of the crops. While, threshing is the process of separating the grains from the harvested crop. harvesting is separating the crop from the soil, and threshing is separating the grains from the chaff. Wikipedia, Sep 4, 2011”. (As I was growing up, our threshing machine was often referred to as the separator.)

“The first threshing machine was invented circa 1786 by the Scottish engineer Andrew Meikle, and the subsequent adoption of such machines was one of the earlier examples of the mechanization of agriculture.” Prior to the development of the threshing machine, grain was separated using hand-wielded flails.

“Cyrus Hall McCormick invented the mechanical reaper in 1834, which combined all the steps that earlier harvesting machines had performed separately. His time-saving invention allowed farmers to more than double their crop size and spurred innovations in farm machinery.” The first reaper only provided more efficient cutting of the grain. The cut grain fell on a platform behind the cutter bar, was manually removed, and formed into bundles of stalks with a strand of stalks used to constrain the bundles. The bundles were then formed into “shocks” in the field where additional drying could take place before being threshed.

“The reaper-binder, or binder, is a farm implement that improved upon the simple reaper. The binder was invented in 1872 by Charles Baxter Withington, a jeweler from Janesville, Wisconsin. In addition to cutting the small-grain crop, a binder also 'binds' the stems into bundles or sheaves.” By 1881, McCormick was marketing a reaper-binder and claimed credit for its invention.

The McKees had a McCormick-Deering threshing machine that probably had been purchased ca. 1928 at the time that a 10-20 McCormick-Deering tractor was acquired. The folded-up thresher shown is very similar to the McKee thresher. At the left is the feeder, hinged down so that the thresher could be towed from farm to farm. The feeder could be fed from horse-drawn hay-racks on either side. Its powered feed was a cross-bar-chain link that pulled the bundles, grain first under reciprocating knives that cut the twine. Immediately inside the thresher the bundles encountered a beater bar which knocked the heads off the stalks. The grain and straw than proceeded through the thresher over sets of shaking beds designed to allow the grain to fall but carrying the straw through to the blower that would then blow the straw into a stack. While the blower pipe could be extended, tilted, and moved in an arc to form the stack, there was usually some manual tending to shape the straw stack. It should be noted that the straw yield from threshing in this way was much greater than in later years when the grain was combined and the straw immediately left in the field and subsequently collected and bailed.

The capacity of the thresher was sufficiently high that substantial crews could be kept busy loading racks in the field, hauling the loads to the thresher, feeding the thresher and dealing with the straw and grain output from the thresher. One of the remarkable features of the thresher was a weighing system which allowed the grain to accumulate in a bucket until a half-bushel had been collected. The grain would then be dumped and flow by gravity into a wagon; a mechanical counter kept track of the number of times grain was dumped.

Just as help from multiple farms joined together for this harvest, their wives joined together to prepare dinner for the entire crew, an event captured by Grant Wood.

One memorable Threshing anecdote involved the variability of a summer rain. On a day when the crews were threshing for Carl Hargis, the Hargis’ phoned at midmorning inquiring why the McKees were not there to finish the threshing. Bonar, a mile-and-a-half away, told them it had rained 2-1/2 inches at his farm and Everett, another three miles East, had reported over 10 inches. Well, Carl informed them that they had not received a drop! So the threshing went on.

Not long after I had begun to drive the tractor pulling the power binder, there was a shift to combines for threshing. This simplified the threshing process with one disadvantage. The process of creating shocks in the field provided a way for weeds growing in the grain to dry before threshing and the grain itself could be cut at a higher moisture level which also reduced the possibility that a summer storm would flatten a field. When Everett and Ryle’s son John bought combines, the McKee thresher was set aside. It should be noted that Bonar had hired combining previously for his small wheat field which was constrained to about 13 acres by government regulations.

Hay Making

Haying was another farm function that changed as I grew up. We progressed from totally loose leaf transported only on hay-racks to a partially mechanized buck rake system, to entirely baled. While the McKee’s on the highway still worked together to get the hay into the barn, the changes facilitated doing the work with fewer workers.

Although hay balers, some of them stationary, had been around for some time, my father was proud that he had enough space in the barn to accommodate “loose”, not baled hay. There were several advantages. First, since the hay could be collected at a higher moisture level without spoiling in the mow, the opportunity to avoid rain was better. In addition, fewer leaves were lost which meant the hay was more palatable and nutritious as feed.

We McKees all employed a crop rotation of oats, clover, corn, corn and back to oats. We also had alfalfa which created a more complicated rotation, for the alfalfa was good for several years after getting started as an under crop with the oats. Both alfalfa and clover were raised for the hay they produced. Clover hay was considered perfectly ok for the horses but alfalfa with its somewhat higher protein content was preferred for the cattle. Haymaking was a mixture of individual effort and shared effort. The preliminary work of mowing and raking the mostly cured hay into windrows was conducted by the farmer and hired help at the individual farms. We had a horse-drawn J.I. Case mower with a six-foot cutter bar. (We felt superior to the farmers who had only a five-foot cutter bar on their mowers.) We also had a side delivery rake, also horse drawn, purchased about 1940 that was much more productive in creating windrows continuously than the “dump” rake it succeeded which moved perpendicular to the windrow and dumped its load lengthening the multiple windrows each time it moved across the field.

About 1952, my father succumbed to the need for the productivity of bales and we began to hire Ed Henry to bale our hay with his 116W John Deere Baler. He pulled a rack behind the baler so that bales could be loaded directly without hitting the ground. As noted in another essay, I purchased the same model baler in the spring of 1955 to do all the baling for the McKee brothers as well as baling around the county. That baling paid for all my college expenses that were not covered by a scholarship..

The other incident involved my father. As I drove, he was standing on the mower in order to pick up the occasional thistle to keep it from ending up in the hay. After one stop, I jumped off and either cleared a cutter bar or picked up a thistle. Climbing on and proceeding, neither of us noted that dad had shifted his position slightly but it turned out enough to be close enough for a protrusion on the power take-off to catch the cuff of his overalls and wind his pantleg around the power take-off, popping the main overall button, and undressing him before I could stop the power take-off. Fortunately, he sustained only minor bruises.

One interesting aspect of haying was the system for getting the hay into the mow whether loose-leaf or baled. The barn roofs had a protrusion just like the buildings in Amsterdam along the canal which provided the fulcrum (and the end of a track) for the line that extended up from the fork on the hayrack to the far end of the barn and down to the ground where it was attached to some kind of motive device, either a horse or a tractor. The carriage that rode along the track was an interesting mechanism. When it returned to the track end above the hayrack, it locked in position and released the fork which was lowered with a pulley. This pulley reduced the effective weight of the load by a factor of two. When this pulley entered the carriage, it released the stop and allowed the load to ride along the track. A separate lightweight line connected to the fork released the hay when jerked and was used to retrieve the fork and carriage for the next load. We used two forks, a two tined fork and a four tined fork. The two tined fork could only be used on loose hay which the four tined fork could be used on either loose hay of to lift eight bales.

Corn Picking

My earliest memories of corn picking were horse drawn wagons with a side board significantly higher on one side and ears of corn thrown against the side board. Typically, the man picking the corn wore a special bracket over his mitten that allowed him to remove most of the husk as he removed the ear from the stalk. The horses could be controlled with voice commands to move the wagon forward, much as I control my home lighting today with Alexa.

Our earliest mechanical corn-picking efforts were conducted using a one-row John Deere prototype provided for testing by a John Deere engineer who worked at the plant in Ankeny and happened to be married to the grade school teacher where my cousins Wayne and Brenton attended school. I don’t think that this unit ever moved into production. As a single row device positioned to the outside of the right rear tractor wheel, it probably lacked the capacity of two row pickers and its position didn’t make it particularly compatible with farm gates. I think that at the time of these experiments, we probably had begun to hire someone to pick our corn.

Our next major milestone came in the fall of 1953 or 1954 when my father bought an International Harvester model 24 corn-picker[1] at a very good price from a dealer in Chariton. The price was so good because the picker arrived totally disassembled. My father and the hired man assembled the corn-picker, installed it on our 1952 Farmall H and it became the picker used on all of the Bonar McKee and Everett McKee corn in return for Everett’s combining all of Bonar’s small grain. (John had purchased his own combine and picker.)

The corn crop in the fall of 1956 was not good and I remember on one occasion when picking in a field for Uncle Everett driving in fourth gear rather than usual 2^nd because the yield was so small.

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