Thankyou Red, I am not sure of how to post addresses, I can give you my parents address in London as they send me letters and could send it on very easily - and there is always coming and going from there. Or give my address here, does one just post it and later delete it?
Of old times - My father, born 1920, grew up amongst a large farming, extended, family and has told me of his early years when it was time to get in the harvest - all the family would descend on the farms in turn and harvest. First a horse drawn cutter would drop the grain in rows, or hand scythes would be used. The scythes had a sort of basket which would catch the grain stalks into one shock quantity so it could be deposited in a pile, one swing from these powerful men. Then the piles would be tied into shocks using a length of the grain stalk - these weighted about 60 pounds each I think. Shocks would be stacked upright in a tripod with one laying over the top - and now could cure to the right water content and stay dry.
Wagons were used to collect this - huge horse wagons pulled by massive cart horses - the cart wheels as tall as a man so they could ride across plowed land. A man or two would ride the wagon stacking the shocks high as men used pitch forks to fling the shocks up onto it, all day they would do this back breaking work - the women and children working as hard. Hired, traveling, threshing machines and crew, would come and thresh out the grain, separating it into straw, chaff and grains into sacks. Massive machines run by long belts and a donkey engine. Huge meals would be set out for the large group assembled - men using over 5000 calories a day.
My father tells of his uncle that had two German Sheppard dogs and how they (with all the other's dogs) would run along side the men to kill the rats and mice - every tripod of grain having some rodents in ti. This would be some entertainment for the crews, and good for the community as the population would have become seasonally huge, - as the last shocks were pitched the rodents would run and be caught by the dogs.
Amazing, this is in living memory. He is one of the last WWII vets, and had such an amazing life. An expert skier, pilot, master blue water sailboat racer, marksman (He was captain of a nationally top pistol team when young) worked around the world - he actually surveyed and built the road from Kandahar to Kabul (he is civil engineer, and aeronautical engineer and surveyor) (why we lived there, 8 years in the region) just story after story if one asks - worked in the bush and in remote countries.
He jumped ship after WWII in Vancouver BC as it was taking too long to travel the coast to Alaska (after the war he bummed about, hitchhiking and doing jobs) and got a job teaching surveying at the University of BC where he met my mother wile hitching to work (his car had broken down). He was running late and so just stopped her at a light - he recognized her from the campus where she was studying art, and asked her to take him to his class. My mother later moved to San Francisco for a job at a newspaper and he fallowed her - they had become close - and got a job surveying in the remote towers in the Coastal mountains for the LORAN stations; based in San Francisco - and they married there........and so it went, always up to something.
Some quick googling - 1925 farm - about 4 minute begins the grain threshing - amazing.[video]http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/709[/video]
If that does not work I really recommend this link to it instead.
http://www.eafa.org.uk/catalogue/709
Edit to say Look at the size of those horses at 8 minute! This was high scale farming, tractors taking over but still - the horse farm at this level was an amazing technological achievement.