Farming, harvesting the ancient way, part three.

Dear readers, in this blog, we have written several posts about D.I.Y. articles that dealt with building works. Having done that, we started with this post, Farming today is still a risky business. Now in this blog, we are going to write part of an old article called, Farming today compared to the old ways; we are doing this to give farming the importance they deserve, so that you know why we are talking about farming. When we finish with this article, we want to talk about some social issues that can affect all of us. We will start with some Australian social issues that we have already written in the past, when these things happened; then we will follow with what is happening these days. This is only our views of what we see happening, so, we hope we can say something that can be helpful. We are starting with this article about farming and their problems, since farming is the most important part of our society, because it produces food for us to live. We hope to interest lots of people. 

Anyhow, you can also find this article at, http://oldman-lifeworks.blogspot.com, 

My other sites; http://frankmenchise.com,http://diybrickwork.com,http://manneedsgod.co.uk  

You can see more at this addresses, DIY brickwork  and,  http://diybrickwork.com,  

To see this article in full,  Farming today compared to the old way 

To understand what we are saying here, we must imagine how harvesting was done a couple of centuries ago, before the industrial revolution or progress. I believe that most of the wheat was harvested by hand with a sickle, just like this man in the photo harvesting wheat.  

Wheat harvesting the ancient way.  

Dear readers, this is part three of, Farming today compared to the old way, where we want to show you the great improvement that we have achieved and the better life that we have achieved. Anyhow, we had to divide our original article in three parts to make it easier. Anyhow, we have written this article to compare and explain how farming was done at the time when I was young, and we have done that, so, in this blog we want to compare the ancient ways of farming with today farming. Here I need to say that I have witnessed the last part of this old practice when I was young. You see, when I was young we were already using a horse drawn harvester, and it was very helpful; but there were people that had some small holdings and we had one of these ourselves, it was in a place, where it was hard to go with the harvester that we had, so, we had to use the old ways for harvesting our wheat for that small wheat field, because that was the only way to do it for one reason or another.

So, let me describe how harvesting was done in those old bygone days; at harvesting time strange as it may seem today, we could hire some specialized people that were good at using the sickle, these people usually went from town to town to do this seasonal harvesting job; we need also to explain that in Southern Italy because the terrain has different altitude the wheat reaches maturity at different times, this was helping these seasonal workers to have a longer span of work, now just to compare those very hard times with today times, I have to tell you that these workers were sleeping anywhere they could on a sack filled up with straws under a shelter if they could find one, as they could not afford anything else. In the morning they would get up early and wait in the town square hoping that somebody would hire them for the day.

Now let us say that we had a small plot about one acre and we could not use the harvester, because it was not possible to go there, we would hire four people and form a gang that could harvest one acre in one day and collect it in hips, that later would be taken on a cart to the farm house to be threshed one way or another.

In the old times anything that had grown in the field was collected, it needed to be collected for the people to survive, because the fields did not produce as much as they do today, because they could not be cultivated with our modern machines. You see, today we have the tractor to cultivate the fields and it does a better job than the horse drawn plough, we have many types of fertilizer to help us grow more wheat but let us go back to talk about very old harvesting times.

This photo above shows you a large group of harvesters on a large field harvesting this wheat with their sickles, so, wheat then must have been a lot dear than today, because it took an infinite amount of work to collect the wheat. Anyhow, after cutting and collecting the bundle of wheat, there was still a lot of other things to do, as we are going to tell you. 

Wheat harvesting and threshing the very old time 

Now I must say briefly how the older generations before my times used to thresh their entire harvests, to collect their produce. Now, let us suppose that it was a few bundles of wheat to be threshed one could even extract the wheat by hitting them with a stick, but let us say that we had a cart-full, or many cart full for that matter, then we had to use a different method, which is the way that most farm used in the very old times for centuries, before the threshing machine was invented, so, let me tell you how it was done. 

I happen to know this procedure, because in the farms when I was young, we were still using this method with smaller crops, most likely broad beans, lentils, chickpeas, linseed, and other farm produce that were not meant to go through the wheat trashing machine. When we were doing this procedure of threshing these minor crops, the elder would always be telling us that this was the way that they used to collect their wheat as well and usually it took them a few months to collect all the season produce. So, now let me describe this to you, so that we can compare the difference.

In order to do this old threshing, first of all we needed to prepare a piece of ground that is very solid and smooth, this can be achieved by stripping the old dry grass on a piece of land that had a large clay content, then wet it with a little bit of water to make it compact; once that was ready we would place our wheat or whatever was to be threshed and collected on this clean ground, then we would get our horses mule and donkeys whatever animals were available and drive them around and around until everything was threshed. Of course there was a lot more to say, but let us make it short otherwise it would become too boring.

In the old times most things were threshed by driving farm animals over the produce around and around, and at the same time we had to turn this wheat around several times; after doing that we had to separate the wheat from the straws.  

People working, lifting the wheat and the straws up and letting it fall down, hoping the the wind would blow the straws away, since they are lighter that the wheat. This work could go on for ours, until they were separated.         

Now, once the threshing was done we had to separate the produce from the straw and any other foreign matter, this was achieved by removing the straws from the top layer making sure that no produce was left with the straws, at the same time we would collect the bottom layer in a hip, once that was done we would have to clean that produce by using the wind, to take away the finer parts that were still mixed with the wheat or whatever it was, and there were many other things that we could use to get this wheat clean, by the end of the day we could have collected two or three hundred kilograms of produce, and when we did that we thought that we had done well for a day work.

                                                    Wheat ears. 

In the very ancient times was even worse, see what they were using in the Medieval Times, here is a link to check out some ancient farm tools including the Flail and Winnowing Basket used to collect and clean wheat.

Medieval Farm Tools 

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                                                                Clean wheat

I hope that what we have written gives the modern reader a view of how thing were done in the old times, so, I do not want to say much more about how all this threshing and cleaning of the wheat was done, because even writing about it is boring today, but anyhow it needed to be done in those days, because that was the only way to collect our wheat to make bread and other things to eat. Now, my dear reader’s do you see how hard was then even to collect wheat for ourselves, so that we could make bread and other cereal product.

I hope I have been able to write something that really sets up the great difference of the ways of life that we were living then and the ways of life that we are living now, for this I want you to compare and judge for yourself how much better off we are today.

To the young people who think that today life is hard, let me describe to you what I have witnessed when I was young, because then life was indeed harder than today, you see those days everybody had to find how to earn enough to feed themselves there were no handover from the government. So, the very poor people of those days were trying to collect anything they could to feed themselves, as I have witnessed these things myself, so, let me describe this to you:

You see, at harvest time this is what I have witnessed, I have seen old and poor people mainly old ladies go around the fields and pick up any ear of wheat that was left behind in the fields, one ear of wheat here and another ear wheat there until they had the strength to go around, they did this each day until harvest time was over and there was nothing else to collect; and I tell you what these poor people were happy if in the end they had collected enough ears of wheat that they could thresh and clean themselves, perhaps they could have collected enough to make 50 to 100 kilos of wheat during harvest time and they were happy because, they could make bread from this wheat and not go hungry for a few months.

Now I hope that you can see what I mean when I say that the youths of today don’t know anything about hard times?

Anyhow, I hope that today this abundance of cheap food lasts for a long time, because things can change in the future. Today the climatic change is the worrying part, because we don’t know how much it is going to affect the farms and our lives.  

Dear readers, we have reached the end of out article,  Farming today compared to the old way, so, now we can go back and continue with what we wanted to do after our article, Farming Today Is Still a Risky Business, where we said that we wanted to talk about the Australian Social Security System, because we believe that it has failed to help, when they needed help. 

See you soon. 

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