Our S.E. Nebraska farm, was 200 acres and Dad was proud of the fact that it was all “hog tight”. This meant all fences were good enough to hold hogs. In the early forties there, most of the corn was not picked with mechanical pickers. Much was done by hand and thrown into a wagon, pulled by a “team”. The team would follow the rows, stopping and starting on oral command. The wagon box was built for shelled grain, which weighing about twice by volume, what corn on the cob did and could carry a larger volume of ear-corn. The “box” had side-boards on it to accommodate the volume. A right-handed guy would probably walk between two rows on the left side of the wagon, picking both of them. He grabbed and held the ear, while still on the stalk, with his left hand and had a small metal hook strapped to the heel of the right thumb. The hook was used to separate the husks, near the stem of the ear. He rotated the ear breaking it off the stem before it was tossed into the wagon. The opposite side of the wagon had a “bang-board” which was higher than the rest of the wagon and kept the ears from being over thrown. The end gate was removed from the wagon and replaced with a shovel board. This was the width of the wagon, hinged at the bottom, maybe 60” inches long. This folded down and was suspended by chains on each side, level with the wagon floor. When the shovel board was folded down, it filled with ears that were scooped into the crib, making room for you to go up on it and scoop off the load.
One of those early forties war years we had 90 acres of corn, some of it made 90 bushels, the best yield ever at that time. Most of the acres were hogged down. This means the hogs picked it themselves. This paid off some the debt left over from the 30’s.
One of our neighbors did custom shelling with a machine he pulled from farm to farm and powered with his “H”. Late 40’s, he bought a new machine, it was mounted on and powered by a hew Dodge truck. The ear corn would dry down on it’s own while stored, in the well ventilated cribs. Then it was shelled before time for the next crop to come in. No one we knew had dryers in those days. Some early mechanical pickers were intended to just get the ear off the stalk and into the wagon. Most of the husks were still on the ears and in the wagon. Later husking beds were added to remove the husks and leave them in the field. The first picker-sheller I saw in the early 50’s, was a Case, two row pull type. It had a high storage container that when full, fed by gravity into a wagon or truck.
In the ear corn days, if you were feeding it in the hog lot, you would let them shell it as they ate it and there was not much corn wasted. If you feed cattle you would run the entire ear through the hammer-mill and feed it that way. With the cattle eating the cob as well as the kernels, it served as roughage and less hay was required. If the corn was shelled it might be fed to poultry or shipped.
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Today's Featured Article - Usin Your Implements: Bucket Loader - by Curtis Von Fange. Introduction: Dad was raised during the depression years of the thirties. As a kid he worked part time on a farm in Kansas doing many of the manual chores. Some of the more successful farmers of that day had a new time saving device called a tractor. It increased the farm productivity and, in general, made life easier because more work could be done with this 'mechanical beast'. My dad dreamed that some day he would have his own tractor with every implement he could get. When he rea
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