Old Grain Binder
I was skimming through old photos and ran across a large number of photos from various tractor shows I’ve been to over the last few years. It’s always interesting to take my sons, now in their late 20s, to these things. They are constantly amazed by the machinery, how ingenious our farming ancestors were. They are also amazed when they find out that as a child I worked with a lot of this stuff, or had neighbors that were still employing it when I was young.
I never used a grainbinder, thank God. My father had gotten a combine long before. But we still had quite a few neighbors who used to thresh.
These things were quite the contraptions. I’m amazed that they worked at all. That they survived as long as they did, well into the late 50s and early 60s in some parts of the state, is a testament to how well they were made, and how cheap Wisconsin farmers were (grin).
In case you’ve never seen one of these before, they were part of the grain harvesting process. The binder would cut the grain, tying it into bundles called shocks. The shocks were then stacked upright in the field to allow them to dry for several days, before being loaded on a wagon and taken to the threshing machine, where the thresher would seperate the grain from the straw and hulls. Sounds like a lot of work today, but it was an enormous improvement over what had been done previously.
What always amazes me at these shows is how much of this equipment I not only recognize, but often worked with myself as a kid. And after seeing a lot of this stuff up close, I realize now why so many old farmers were missing fingers, toes, hands, etc.
