Thrashing time was one of the most exciting times on the farm. It was a labor intensive operation. There would be extra help for stooking grain, we called it shocking grain, and still more for the final thrashing. The binder would cut the grain. It would be carried by a canvas to a bundle makeing piece of machinery on the binder. It would bundle the grain and wrap a twine around it and tie a knot in the twine and cut the twine in one operation. The machine then would place the bundles on a rack until there were enough for one stook and then the operater would dump the load. To make it easier for the stookers the operater would dump the bundles in a staight row. The knot tying mechanism was the most interesting. Four horses were required to pull the binder.
During the actual thrashing there would be about eight teams of horses with drivers to haul the bundles to the thrashing rig. There were also spike pitchers to help pitch the bundles into the thrashing machine. They would also keep the area around the machine clear of fallen bundles. There were grain handlers and of course a boss and cooks to feed everybody. That comes to about fifteen people to feed.
Two cooks operating out of a Cook Car would make all the meals and lunches. The women would prepare and serve breakfast and dinner in the cook car. Coffee and sandwitchs would be taken out to the field for coffee breaks and lunch at noon.
The thrashing machine was huge and it took a lot of power to operate it. A belt, about one hundred feet long, from the tractor to the machine had to be very tight in order not to slip. The big job for the boss was to grease the bearings and make sure everything was working properly.
A characteristic of the fall landscape in those days was the huge piles of straw that would be blown out of the big stack on the thrashing machine. These would be burned in the fall causing quite a site and lots of smoke. My father, Jonas Dravland, had a McCormick Deering 15-30 tractor, the tractor pictured is like the Rumley Oil Pull my grandfather Ole Dravland used. He sold it at an auction sale in 1926.
In the late 1990's one man with a combine can cut the grain and thash it in one operation. The only help he would is a grain hauler. Thrashing rigs required many bundle haulers to get the bundles of grain to the stationary machine. One combine operator and one grain hauler can cover many more acres of grain in a day than fifteen people using a thrashing machine.