Old Ways of Farming

In his 1908 book Pioneer Life in Illinois, F. M. Perryman told of the “three boy” method of planting corn in the years after the virgin prairie was first plowed in the 1840-60s. As the boys walked along the distinct rows of sod the plow had turned over, the first boy would cut a wedge opening in the sod with an ax, the second boy would drop in two grains of corn and the third boy would close the hole by hitting it with the back of an ax. They would then move forward a step and repeat the process. With the first boy setting a rhythmic cadence by repeating the word “now,” “now,” “now” those three boys could plant five acres of corn in a day.

In the 1930s farming methods had advances a great deal over the “three boy” system, but we were still in the transition period between horses and tractors. We used the tractor for plowing and disking, but Dad did all of our corn planting with a two-row planter pulled by a team of horses. And corn planting was rather complicated then because corn was “checked” —that is, the rows were thirty inches apart and the corn was spaced thirty inches apart in the row so that the crop could be “cross cultivated” (cultivated across the rows as well as along the rows). The planting process involved stretching a quarter-mile length of planter wire (a special wire with dime-sized knobs spaced exactly thirty inches apart) across the field. The planter wire was run through a “fork” on the planter and those little knobs tripped the planting mechanism at just the right interval. It was a slow, clumsy system, but it worked.

I never got involved with planting corn, since Dad always insisted on handling that job himself, but I did spend a lot of time cultivating corn. (The cultivator cut the weeds and loosened the soil between the rows of corn.) I drove the tractor while John handled the two-row cultivator behind me. That old cultivator had been used for years behind a three-horse team, but Dad had cut the tongue to a stub and adapted it to be pulled behind the tractor. And John and I went down those rows a lot faster than horses could! We went as fast as the tractor would go—even turning at the ends at full speed. My job was easy, but John had to be really quick (and strong) to pull the levers to take the cultivator blades out of the ground just as we were ready to turn and then set the blades again just when we started down the next rows. It was John’s skill that allowed us to set speed records without accidentally cutting down corn.

But there were few speed records when it came to shucking corn by hand. That was a slow, hard job! And, since shucking often wasn’t finished until January or later, it was a really cold job when snow was on the ground. Working as hard as I could, I was never able to come up with more than about seventy bushels of corn in a ten-hour day’s work. With today’s huge, modern machines seventy bushels of corn takes less than ten minutes. And these machines shell the corn while they’re at it. In my day corn was stored in the ear and much of it was fed to farm animals by the ear. Horses and pigs ate the kernels off the ear and left the cobs; for cows the ear was broken into three pieces and the cows ate the whole thing—cobs and all. When surplus corn was sold a contract sheller was hired. The grain went to the Bethany Grain Company and the cobs were used as kindling to start fires in the stoves in the house—and for corncob fights with Paul. (Paul usually won.)

Another big farm job was putting up loose hay. By the very late thirties hay balers became more common, but before that everyone put up “loose” hay for feeding livestock in the winter. Our barn had a huge door at the north side of the haymow and an iron “trolley” track the length of the haymow. After Dad had sunk a huge hayfork into the load of hay on a hayrack below the big door, he would call, ”Right!” That was my cue to lead our horse, Fanny, who was hitched to a long rope that pulled the fork loaded with hay, up to the top of the mow and along the track until Charlie Winters in the haymow yelled, “Right!” That meant that the batch of loose hay was above the spot in the haymow where Dad wanted it and signaled Dad to pull the “trip rope” to dump it. At this point I turned Fanny around and headed back toward the barn for the next batch. Dad said that the reason he always used the word “Right” for a signal was that it was a clear, simple word that was not as easily misunderstood as alternatives, such as “OK” or “go ahead.”