https://sites.google.com/site/prayersofreconciliation/,https://sites.google.com/site/godintheuniverse/,
https://sites.google.com/site/menfrancoreconciliation/, www.catholic.org/,www.catholic.org.au/, www.catholic.org/bible/, www.adherents.com/Religions_By_Adherents.html,
http://diybrickwork.com, http://manneedsgod.co.uk, http://frankmenchise.com
This can be found at this link in more details, Farming today compared to the old way
Compare wheat harvest in the fifties.
The following
description is the way of wheat harvest time in the fifties. When I was young
we had already a horse drawn harvester that was helping us, this early
harvester was able to cut the wheat plants and tie them in bundles, so, we were
already halfway down the track of progress, as this machine saved us a lot of
work, because we did not have to harvest by hand, which is a very labor
intensive job, as we are going to describe later in this article. Anyhow, at
this time of the year everybody in the farm works hard and for very long hours,
it is very hot and everything is very dry. We get up very early in the morning,
we get the horses ready for working by feeding them and watering them, then we
harness the horses and set them to pull the harvester, and off we go in the
fields for another day of hard work, if everything goes well, we might be able
to go over a ten-acre field just in one day with this harvester. The harvester
needs two people to get it working, one drives the horses and another regulate
the harvester, the harvester goes around the field and leaves these bundles of
wheat or other cereal, whatever has been sown in the field. Now these bundles
of wheat will be collected in hips around the field from other people as soon
as possible, the hips of these bundles of wheat are made is such a way that if
it rains the rain would run off easily, these hips of wheat will be collected
later when we finish with the harvester, perhaps in a week or two, then we will
go back to the fields with a cart to take everything on a special plot near the
farmhouse, where the threshing machine will be hired and set.
When we collect and
cart everything to the farm house, we work very long days, we get up before 4
am, but we have a break of two or three hours at lunchtime because it is too
hot to do anything, then we go back to work and between real work and looking
after the animals we finish at dusk around 8 pm, after that we only have to
feed the horses: this sort of work goes on for more than a month and sometimes
up to two months, with no breaks at all seven days a week. Everybody in the
farm works to their maximum and they are very tired, they are also very worried
about the possible fire hazard, and also of any thunder storms at this time of
the year, since anyone of these happenings can destroy the whole crop, and a
whole year of hard work can go up in smoke. So, we are all working hard, and at
the same time we are praying God and waiting for the threshing machine to come
and finish our harvest.
When some farmer did
not have a lot of wheat to thrash, they could use a place in common with other
farmers, so that, the thrashing machine would not have to be set several times.
The thrashing machine that were around and we would hire together with other
farmers came with a large crew, because it was a very large machine, bigger than
the one shown in this article, it had a crew of about twenty people, it was a
very interesting time when we were thrashing our own wheat, oats, barley, etc.
Because we were anxious to see how much wheat and other product we had made.
Now there were many
other things that I could tell you, but I better not, to make this story short.
Anyhow, here I want to say that when one goes through these life experiences in
the farm, one knows that farming life is hard; but since this is the only way
to grow food to feed ourselves, we the farmers keep working in our farms to
feed ourselves and the rest of the community.
So, we the farmers
feel that it would be right if the rest of the community appreciates our
efforts, so, they should be thanking us for all the hard work that we have
done, after all, we are providing all those things that are necessary to make food for the rest of the community; but it does not happen that way, because
even when we are working our guts out, and while we are doing that we are
becoming dull, the rest of the community does not care and they label us as
dull people; their attitude hurts us very much and we believe that we don’t
deserve that; just because we are farm people, but we have done our part of
hard work for our own benefit and for the benefit of the entire community. So,
we the farmers feel hurt to say the least.
This is how life
was then in the small farms of Southern Italy. Anyhow, this town people
attitude as I have said above, plus some very lean years when we hardly could
survive, and because we had only a small farm and it would have been hard to
expand was one of the reasons why I left farming and migrated to Australia. But
anyhow let us continue to describe how harvesting was done the very old way, so,
that we can compare it to today’s living.
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Harvesting the very old way
Now, before we finish this article, we want to compare the very old ways of farming with today
farming, we need to say how harvesting wheat was done before my times; here we
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.
In the old time, to harvest the wheat and other cereal a lot of people were needed, it was like what this old man is doing, you needed to cut the wheat with a sickle, and when you had a handful tie it up, put it on the ground carefully, then repeat it again and again, until you had enough handful to make a bundle, and so on.
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.
Wheat harvesting and threshing the very old time
Now I must say
briefly how the older generations before my times used to thresh their
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
threshing 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 be boring.
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.
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.
I hope that this
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 really was 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.
I believe that this article is too long, to see more and read the entire article as it appears in Hub Pages, click on this link, Farming today compared to the old way. See you in our next article, the town that I have come from, Genzano di Lucania. See you then.
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