Monday, October 31, 2022

My dad's uncle Alfred out harvesting. Amazing to think that only a short time ago literal horse power was the normal way to bring the crop in.

 


I'm gonna have this blown up and framed.

13 comments:

  1. When I was a kid we stopped to see one of my grandfathers cousins, he was out mowing the lawn/pasture with a mule drawn sickle bar mower. Also had continuous cold running water from a ram pump in the spring. This was in about 1973 I'm guessing.

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  2. itinerant crews with reapers drawn by 40+ horses were contracted during harvests.

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  3. My father, born in 1918, dropped out of high school at 16 to start farming 400 acres with a friend and his friend’s father. He told me of using both horses and early tractors, and I think he liked the horses better, judging by the way he talked about them. Then came 7 December 1941, he enlisted immediately and because he knew how to work on tractors they sent him to aircraft mechanic school. Never got back to farming, spent the rest of his life working in aviation in some form, including the Apollo program.

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  4. Get a many big, big copies made, roll them up tight into a clue-bat, then find 'no more oil' protesters and whack them silly with it.

    When they recover consciousness., unroll one copy and give it to them.

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  5. CW, I've got a great picture of my father driving a team of horses pulling a wagon full of shocks to a threshing machine. Another great story of when the thresher broke and the horses took off. He's 99 5 months to 100 still pretty sharp but the body is failing slowly. His motto is "a day at a time."

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  6. Forgot to add he's a WWII Navy vet whose Destroyer was taken out by Kimakaze the same day as LL's father's destroyer was. Came back and returned to farming.

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  7. A real man’s car!!!

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  8. We were an agrarian society once.

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  9. There were a lot more farmers a century plus ago than there are now. And on a per farm basis they produced far less food than a current farm does. Going back to 'the good old days' would mean starvation for a lot of people. Modern farming using tractors and fertilizer feeds millions of people that otherwise wouldn't eat.

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    1. I forget the exact numbers, but in the early 20th century something like 90% of the people were involved in the food industry. Growing it, transporting it, raising it, selling it, etc.
      By the 60's, about 3/4 of workers were involved in the automotive/vehicle industry.

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    2. Add in that fertilizer is associated with oil production, and trying to eliminate that by returning to the old days of "organic" farming would absolutely starve a huge percentage of the world's population. The most successful organic farmers only get about 75% of current food output, and most get a lot less. Figure maybe 50% of current food production, and if fuel oil production gets more restricted like the 'greens' want to, most of the world will starve to death.

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  11. Ha!
    "Organic"
    Old Indian word for "Sprays at night".
    BTW Those sheaves of grain were stood up to allow for more drying, and late in the season up here in North Maine, another sheaf was laid across the top to divert the snow off the underlying sheaves.
    This process was called "Stooking"

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