*** Binders and bundles. . g history

 I woke up this morning  thinking about childhood days shocking grain that had been cut and bundled by a farm machine  I could not remember "binder" for anything.  Did a  Google search for "machine to make grain bundles.  That turned up a very interesting link with a pdf of  McCormick  1903 grain, hay and forgage machines. Sure enough, images of several of the old machines my father was still using.  One other memory from those days.   We had oat bundles shocked in the field.   Dad hired a  90 year old neighbor who knew how to stack bundles.  Jens Peter Jensen got it done as if he were a 30 year old.   Anyway, below is a link to the old machinery which will probably still work today if anybody held onto the antiques.

  University of Nebraska Digital Ag History 1903 McCormick Advertising Brochure     (Scroll down to get to the brochure. )    

 So much for old memories. At first I did not know how to save the ad brochure, but it is easy.  Right click on the brochure and select "download page".  It is fulltext.pdf and has about 35 pages.  Just takes seconds to download.  Worth having if you are at all interested in old farm equipment or had the misfortune of riding on the back of a binder or dump rake originally made to be pulled by horses.

****Stay tuned even if the information probably preceded the invention of radio--- Doug Wiken

                                      

Comments

[David Newquist]

I remember the scratched up forearms when shocking oats on my uncles farms. They did not buy new equipment if the old was still working. So I drove a tractor to pull a binder. However, Uncle Frank, who tended artillery horses in France on 40 & 8 boxcars kept a team of horses until he retired from farming. He used them occasionally to justify having them, so one day he hitched them to the binder. He drove over a bumblebee nest in the oat field. The bees swarmed out, attacking both Frank and horses. He jumped off and headed toward the fence line, while the horses just took off as fast as they could go with that binder clattering and bouncing behind them until it fell apart. My uncles hired a neighbor with a tractor-drawn combine to finish the harvest, and then bought an IH combine to be pulled by one of their Farmall Hs. The horses enjoyed a lengthy retirement.