When the Purdue Ag Alumni crew unveiled the reconditioned 1910 Nicholson-Shephard Red River Special grain thresher and fired it up at Pioneer Village at the Indiana State Fair, it took three people to throw bundles into the separator, one man to monitor the separator and three more men to bale up straw with a stationary baler. And that doesn’t count the labor it took to get the bundles onto the wagon pulled up by the thresher in the first place.

Today, one combine with one driver can thresh 100 or more acres per day, depending upon the size of machine and wheat yield. Technology is already here that would allow the driver to dump grain on the go into a grain cart pulled by a tractor without a driver. One person with a big round or large square baler could bale the straw. Two people will be doing the work of what took maybe a dozen or so men just a few decades ago, and do it in lightning speed compared to that era.

The grain in the combine tank probably looks cleaner than the pile in the wooden wagon used to collect grain out of the thresher, even though it was run through a Garden City grain cleaner attached to the thresher.

Technology has helped agriculture advance at light-year speed in quality and productivity, while greatly reducing labor needs at the same time — all pluses. Are there any negatives?

End of threshing rings

A print hangs on my wall issued by Purdue Ag Alumni roughly 20 years ago that depicts a threshing ring dinner scene on an Indiana farm. A couple of things stand out. There are dozens of people of all ages in the picture: men who did the threshing that morning, women who did the cooking and young people who did what ever they could. Most have smiles on their faces.

Anecdotal reports indicate the last of the threshing rings in Indiana disappeared by the mid-1940s. Some may have shut down before that during the World War II years. My late father, Robert, told stories about working on a threshing ring as a teenager, probably in the 1930s. He pulled in wagons of bundles with a team of ponies. One time they got spooked with an empty wagon and took off. It must have ended OK; he never talked about getting scolded for it.

Today’s teenagers on farms don’t have those stories to tell. Farmwives don’t get the honor of fixing big threshing dinners. Oh, they still work plenty hard and many take meals to the field, but they do it alone, not with their neighbors.

What’s missing today are two things: the number of people who once worked on farms, and the camaraderie from working alongside your neighbor, threshing, cooking or carrying water buckets, and laughing and eating together at mealtime.

I’m no sociologist and certainly not a psychologist, but it seems like those are significant changes — especially the loss of relationships with neighbors.  

No, I’m not advocating everyone restore a century-old threshing machine, not by a long shot. I’m just wondering if there’s a way to bring back the community networking and relationships of those bygone days without the drudgery that went with it.

One thing is certain: Technology has changed more than equipment in agriculture.

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