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Friday Photography Blog No 23 | 140 comments (140 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
Re: PHOTOS AS USUAL (4.00 / 2)
Thanks afew.

Couple of additional points here.  This is Kansas!  It was probably 40°C when that picture was taken.  Also, threshing machines were VERY loud.

I am just old enough to have seen a threshing crew in action.  The work was very hard but this is the harvest--there is a joy that a growing season's worth of effort has paid off.  The amount of food it takes to keep the threshers fed is staggering so in addition to the crew you see--there is another crew of mostly women who cooked from dawn until late at night just to keep them going.

So threshing is about cooperation between neighbors.  It is mostly just hot dirty work but there is also an incredible amount of skill on display--social organization, mechanical maintenance, understanding when plants are perfectly ripe for harvest, etc.

Seeing threshing crews in action affected my political outlook.  When I was a university student studying political science, I had an arrogant prick for a professor who one day asserted that Marx had made fun of "the idiocy of rural life."  I thought of myself as a radical leftist in those days but at that moment, I knew I was NEVER going to be a Marxist.  Rural life was a lot of things but idiotic was NOT one of them.  Not surprisingly, the failure to properly organize agriculture was a chronic problem for the Marxists.

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Sat Feb 23rd, 2008 at 06:49:24 AM EST
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Re: PHOTOS AS USUAL (4.00 / 2)
Well said, techno.  I don't remember such crews myself, but I heard the stories growing up.  One of my Dad's favorite stories from his childhood was of such a crew threshing wheat on my Grandfather's farm.  Gramp owned the thresher, a neighbor owned a steam engine.  Several other neighbors gathered to work together and it was a matter of some urgency to get everyone's fields harvested when the wheat was ready and the weather right.

One day the crew was working hard to finish a field, pushing the crew and the machines pretty hard.  Suddenly the pressure relief valve on the boiler began to pop off.  At the time Bill Reedy, the owner of the engine, was on the wagon feeding the thresher.  When he heard the relief valve pop, he knew that very soon a safety plug in the bottom of the boiler would blow out, relieving the pressure and blowing out the fire all at once.  It was a real safety feature.  It meant the crew was in no real danger, but it also meant the boiler, as well as the engine, the thresher, and more importantly the harvest, would be out of commission until a new plug could be installed.

Knowing he had very little time to intervene, he dropped his pitchfork, leaped off the wagon, and sprinted to the engine to manually relieve the pressure and shut down the engine.  In the ensuing silence, he looked around to find that he apparently had the entire wheat field to himself.

"Hey," he called, "where'd everybody go?"

Gradually the rest of the crew appeared from whatever cover they had ducked behind or under.  "What the hell is the matter with you guys?" Bill asked.

After looking around at the rest of the crew slowly gathering from their hiding places, my Grandfather said, "We all looked up and saw you running.  We figured if Bill Reedy was running, it was time to run."

We all bleed the same color.

by budr on Sat Feb 23rd, 2008 at 02:12:25 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Re: PHOTOS AS USUAL (4.00 / 3)
Yes indeed.  Farming is also dangerous--ranking up there with underground mining and heavy construction.

In the 1979 Golden Palme winning film "Northern Lights" there is an incredible scene of a threshing crew in North Dakota.  They are hurrying to finish the job when it begins to snow.  It is VERY realistic.

I got to meet with John Hanson the film's director.  He said that scene happened with NO special effects.  They had called for extras with threshing experience.  They had found machinery that had been put back into operating condition.  When everything was in place and filming had begun, it started to snow.  The director asked an old-timer what would have happened in such a situation.  The old-timer said, "We would have kept threshing."  So they kept filming--creating perhaps the most realistic footage ever in cinematic history.

The award was well-deserved!

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Sat Feb 23rd, 2008 at 05:05:10 PM EST
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Friday Photography Blog No 23 | 140 comments (140 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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