Machines

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 7, 10 April 1944, Page 9

Machines

Every one knows the three periods of threshing history. Ancient threshing, with the flail, survives only in education (parent-offspring relationship) and in the darker recesses of Banks Peninsula (cocksfoot harvest). Middle Age threshing is represented by the traction engine and large wooden mill. This mill, the true original, so to speak, that used to be towed round the country, accompanied by a small train of huts and a galley on wheels, is now losing ground. First the “ tin mill,” then the header, both of

which a farmer might buy for his own farm alone, invaded and retained his country.

Eventually he will go, and with him the steam-engine and mill team life that have been part of Canterbury’s harvest scene for two generations. At present, however, such mills thresh much of the province’s grain at a great rate —200 bushels an hour. Sometimes a tractor, sometimes the effortless silent steam-engine, drives the mill. It employs thirteen men and is a hard taskmaster. Nine work on the mill, four on drays ; a steam-mill needs a “ waterjoey.” Once it starts, you’re for it ; there is no stopping, and the man who can’t take it falls by the wayside. Whether you’re forking sheaves from a dray, cutting the binder twine, forking away the straw from the elevator, or bagging, you’ve just got to keep on forking, cutting, bagging. It’s no shame to say that everybody can’t take it. Some have given in after a day’s work ; they were not unfit, but unused to such work. O.C. Camp scratches his head, but by adjustments and replacements these difficulties are smoothed out.