Trying to get a better idea of how seeding was and is done.

A lot of us here are only familiar with local practices and its hard to get a good idea of what everyone calls common. Due to the grain subsidy in Canada, grain growing in eastern Canada basically stopped the generation before me. Now that is gone, we are relearning how to grow grain in a wet climate. I've been interested in it for a while so I'll explain what was done before.

1) Seedbed prep - same as for grasses, moldboard, spring tooth harrow etc. The disc harrow isn't common in rocky areas here for some reason.

2) Everyone seems to have an old Massey planter on steel with a wooden seed box. They haven't been used since the 50's but thats what most old farms have kicking around. Nobody around now knows anything about them now though. I've never seen one used. I assume seed was drop in the top and once the ground drive kicked in it would meter seeds into the ground?

3) What I see in the woods and rock piles I don't know the name of but it was horse or tractor drawn and was transported sideways. Once in the field the drawbar was turned, a wheel cranked down and a sickle bar cut about a 4 ft swath of grain. The stems fell onto what looked like a walker table that grouped the grain into bundles and it seemed like an auto tie mechanism tied them. Beyond that I'm not sure. Nobody around to ask if the shocks(I think thats the word) were left to stand and dry or if they went into a wagon.

4) The newer artifacts in the rockpiles are towed combines with engines mounted on them. Not many of them around so I assume only the richest farmers had them.


Now I've travelled around out west a lot and see how things are done now out there, and locally things aren't a whole lot different other than smaller scale and the yields we get are incredible in comparison despite all our fungus troubles.

Who knows about the old ways?

The other thing I'll note is I assume the grains were not fertilized here, as the old seed boxes don't have any spot for fertilizer. Even today, there are no NH3 tanks out here. I do see the corn guys with liquid fertilizers on their air seeders.

Ken: Discs weren't used much with rocks because (a) they would get smashed to pieces
(b) the old discs were fairly light and wouldn't make much of an impression,bush discs(extra heavy) were expensive and not many people had enough power to handle them.

The old Massey seed drills were about the best you could get and in their time, Canada had trade policies that favoured Massey, Cockshutt and IH equipment. John Deere and others, unless they were built here were beaucoup expensive. They usually had metal spiral tubes to feed from the seed box to the discs on the ground to control wind deflection. They were also the first things to deteriorate on those drills and a lot of people just let it fall and harrowed afterward with a spike tooth (diamond) to cover the seed.

Number three is a grain binder for the days of threshing with a stationary thresher. Here again it would have likely been a George White #6, Dion or Forano thresher. The sheaves were picked up by hand, put into stooks of 10 sheaves, left to dry for a week or 10 days, then either threshed in the field or the sheaves hauled to the barn and threshed with the thresher in the barn or put in the barn and left until the neighbourhood threshing machine came around, (MAJOR mouse and rat damage).
BTW, grain is in stooks, corn is in shocks.

By the time most people got themselves into little pull-type combines, the custom guys who had run the neighbourhood threshing machine had moved on to bigger self-propelled combines and they were quick compared to the little combines.
Same argument goes on today, wait for the big custom guy and sweat over the weather or get a smaller, older machine for yourself and go at it, slowly.

Not that many people used fertilizer when they still had a big manure pile. A lot of guys now just got the local Co-op and get them to spread fertilizer rather than handle it themselves.

Thanks, that explains the lack of threshing equipment. Every old farm has planting and harvesting equipment in the junkpile, never any threshing stuff.

The other reason for that likely is the weather is not kind to sheet metal here. Out west I saw all kinds of old belt driven threshers that are ancient but I've not seen a one here. Once they rusted out the metal was probably salvaged.

Ken, here in NS we typically (fall) moldboard plow (sod) , disk, spring tooth then fertilize and drill in grain. Lime is a requirement as well due to acidity, we typically spread lime in fall and plow it under.

Still use an old McCormick 13MF drill on steel with wooden box, it has the fertilizer works as most old ones in the area did, but we just run the grain and grass seed on ours now, put fertilizer on separate. We used to run the fertilizer in the grain drill but anything stronger than 6-12-12 on the slowest setting would burn the seed as it bands it together.

Family used to use a binder years ago and have the shooks custom threshed, then the grain later custom combined. We have an old combine, but we now just have it custom cut as it is "less hassle" than running an old gas machine.

It seemed around here that any good threshing machines that came up for public sale were bought by the Mennonite or Amish folk. IF they were steel bodied. I saw a real good Dion thresher up for sale at a consignment sale once and it didn't get one bid. Owner took it home and passed on about a month later. His widow advertised their sale far and wide, some Amish folk attended, paid $800 for the threshing machine, within 15 minutes, it was on a truck headed for Pennsylvania. They are around but getting pretty scarce. 20 years ago, they were $5 for scrap.

Tied them into sheafs and set them up in stooks,this hay [now]usually used in chaff cutting, saw them doing this here last year,using the old machinery.

you are talking about a grain binder. It tied and put the grain into bundles and a carrier arm allowed you to gather few togehter before you let them slide to the ground and were stacked into tepee style. Have one of these. plus the old hay loaders,plus mowers,plus old tedders,plus dump rakes all horse equipment