Farming Methods & Farming Machinery

The first tractor outfit in our community was owned by Frank Kallian and Sons. It consisted of a 16-30 Rumely Oil Pull tractor and a 28-44 Advance-Rumely Ideal separator. If I remember correctly this outfit was shipped to La Valle, Wisconsin by rail in July of 1921. The outfit that I remember best was that owned by H. C. W. Lucht consisting of a Case 18-32 tractor, bought used in 1927 and a 28-46 Case thresher, bought new in July of 1928.

In the summer of 1928 we started shock threshing in our neighborhood. This meant that the farmers hauled the bundles from the field to the machine. When using this system you had at least 4 men out in the field pitching bundles, 7 teams hauled the bundles, and there were at least 4 men who carried the grain from the machine to the granary. In the crew you also had 1 man that tended the sacker, a blower tender and 2 men to set the straw pile. When our threshing run broke up in the summer of 1943 we didn't have as much help so I recall that we hauled the grain in the back of Pete Lucht's International pick-up truck. This was hard work because you had to unload in a hurry and get back before all the bags were filled. In the last years that we threshed we hauled the grain in Dave Held's and Erwin Lucht's trucks and unloaded it with a portable elevator.

I suppose that every thresherman had a favorite machine. In my opinion the Case was one of the simplest machines ever made. They only had 5 belts. The earlier Case 28-46 machines did not have the straw room that the 28-47 of 1936 did. Of all the machines I ever worked around I thought that the Case had the best blower controls. Case never did use the 4 section rotary straw rack so that might be a distinct disadvantage.

Otto Daudert bought a new Minneapolis special threshing machine in July of 1940. This machine had an eccentric instead of a crankshaft so that it was a much smoother running machine than the Case. It also had a Hart self feeder and I thought that this was a good one.

When our Reedsburg High School Agriculture Club visited Swartz Brothers Cornfalfa Farms near Waukesha, Wisconsin in June of (date?) they told us that when they were custom threshermen using a 36-56 Peerless machine and a 30-60 International Mogul tractor they had a blower and many sections of pipe and would blow the grain from the separator to the granary.

I once saw a picture in the Hoard's Dairyman which showed a farmer elevating grain into his granary with a silo filler. He had a trough fixed so that the grain went directly into the blower.

CombinesThe earlier combines were 12, 14, 16, and 20 foot cut and so were not practical in the smaller fields in the middle west, when Allis-Chalmers introduced the All Crop Harvester in 1935 this brought the combine down to the needs of the average farmer. I do recall that the first combine in our community was purchased by Walter Zietlow around 1947. It was a Minneapolis-Moline but he didn't use it very long. Adolph Kallian had an Allis-Chalmers combine around 1946. The first self-propelled combine in Dad's immediate neighborhood was purchased by my cousin Erwin Lucht in 1965. It was a small Massey-Harris.