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August 22, 2011
Threshing - the old ways are the best ways
Well, not always.
One of the boys of the village, who goes by the name of Christian [that's him below, on the blue tractor], bought an old wooden, belt driven, threshing machine.
It took a lot of coaxing and fiddling and tweaking to get it working, and then the baler still didn't work. About six people were needed to operate it and and another dozen to stand around watching and offering advice. Then you need two old tractors with belt drives to power it.
The tractors coughed and chugged into life, the belt drives spun and the long leather belts flopped through the air. The threshing machine rattled and whizzed and wheezed and shook then broke and a man had to go down to the village to make a new wooden piece for the springy-shaky bit.
At the end of the day there were three and a half sacks of grain, and everyone seemed pleased.
Obviously an improvement on the days of trampling the stalks with a cow or hitting it with sticks - Victorian farmers must have wondered at these marvellous labour-saving machines. Mind you, when one person with one of these:
can do a whole field, 15 tonnes of grain, in an afternoon, it goes someway to explaining urban depopulation. That, and discotheques, obviously.
Posted by john at August 22, 2011 08:09 AM