LOL, That was adorable. We don't get these commercials here so everytime I hear of one I can't wait to check it out. Budweiser can do no wrong with their commercials :)
SunnyDJ, I was at Dickens on the Strand....a festival held every December in Galveston, and the Budweiser Clydesdales were there. They had a parade down the strand, but they were also stabled in an old warehouse there. I so embarrassed myself because when I saw them, tears were streaming down my face. They are so beautiful!
We had a horse that was part Clyde - they had those heavily hairy fetlocks ... that were inclined to get a bit itchy.
We also had some Belgians - a bit smaller, more or less maroon/bay in colour, less rangey, i.e., shorter legs, a bit blockier , and Percherons, slightly smaller than the Clydes, gray coloured. Neither the Belgians nor the Percherons had those hairy fetlocks.
Good work horses.
In June, a team (of two) would pull a mowing machine, with a mowing bar about five or six feet long, sticking out one side, with prongs that pushed out through the stalks of hay, and a cutter bar with triangular cutting blades that was pushed back and forth between the prongs, to cut the hay and leave it in a trail behind. All of that work was operated from one of the wheels that was rolling over the ground... so you can imagine that pulling the rig was not a walk in the park.
In July, we had a grain binder, with about a five or six foot cutting bar, to cut the grain (wheat, oats, barley, rye, buckwheat, etc.). The cutting bar worked as on the hay mower, but there was a platform behind it, with a canvas sheet rolling around a couple of rollers to carry the cut stalks of grain to one end. Then there was a structure at an angle, carrying two similar sheets of canvas, the one on the bottom rolling in the same direction as the one on the table, and the one above rolling so that the bottom side was rolling in that direction, to lift the stalks of grain to a higher level. Then they slid down a wooden platform, with a pair of hinged metal pads at the bottom and paddles lifting to push the stalks down together and dropping to return to near the top, then rising for another push at the stalks. When there was enough pressure against the pads at the bottom, they pushed down a bit, to trip the mechanism and a long, curved needle carrying a string of binder twine came up behind the pushed-down stalks, a small shaft with a pinchers on the end grabbed the string, twisted it together with the string left behind from the most recent sheaf of grain to make a knot, a knife cut the string, the curved needle retracted, the paddles released, to flop down to being level with the platform on which the newly-tied sheaf lay, and the packing paddles pushed the sheaf out on to the ground, then the pads popped back up to their original station 90 degrees to the packing platform and the tying process started all over again.
All of this mechanical stuff was operated from a large wheel (with cleats on it) rolling along the ground under the tying platform, so you can imagine that pulling that mess of stuff was no easy task ... which those two horses were doing in hot July.
We seldom heard of a horse getting sick ... or dying ... while they were doing this heavy task, which they did, all day long, for days on end, in hot July.
That was until 1940.
The war started in '39, Dad had a large farm so had a hard time finding enough teams (two horses pulling a wagon) and single workers to send to the neighbours' farms, most of which were smaller, to change works to get the threshing done in 1940 ... which was a wet year: many of the sheaves of grain, with six or eight sheaves standing together to make a stook, had begun to sprout, so that the tops of a number of the stooks were growing green - quite a few sheaves were discarded as being useless, at the threshing machine.
There were three, sometimes four pairs of pitchers with three-pronged forks who travelled from stook to stook, lifting the sheaves to put on the wagons, which had a tall frame of wood boards at each end to hold the sheaves, and several wagons that moved from the field to the threshing machine by the granary, with the operator dropping the sheaves one at a time into the feeder of the threshing machine.
Dad bought a combine harvester in the fall of 1940, so in 1941 this 12 year old collected the grain into a bag on the platform of the combine, tied the bag, dropped it down into a chute, then piled another one or two on top, and when the next one had been tied, pulled a lever to drop about four bags in one place on the field, so save running all over the place and stopping to pick up each bag by itself. We tried to have the stacks of bags side by side, when we could.
My nine year old brother was driving the tractor to pull the rig ... so you can imagine Dad, having got our wagon filled with bags, left the field to empty the bags into the granary in the barn with some trepidation, emptied the bags as fast as he could, and returned ... to find everything operating in apple pie order.
We'd been instructed that, if anything changed in the way the system was working ... to shut it down, until Dad would return! You'd better believe ... those were our instructions!
Three guys(?) working ... instead of about dozen.
The farm wives used to gather to help get the meals ... with about a dozen or fourteen eating ... and they had a great time, together.
It got hairy ... when the lady of the house asked, near the end of the threshing bee, whether the threshing would be done in early afternoon ... in which case the guys would be going home for supper ... or not until about 4:00/4:30 ... in which case they'd figure to be fed there.
Threshing took longer - two or three days, maybe four, at our larger farm.
[Spell check didn't like "stook" ... and some of the horse names: ... oh, well - whom did you ever meet who knew *everything*?]
Dad said that, having no hired men to pay ... and with we small kids doing quite a lot of the work, year-round ... he gave us pay at the end of summer (along with increased allowance, year-round) ...
... and we were to buy our new clothes for school ... and our books. So ... we began to learn, early on, that when one got one big chunk of pay ... it wasn't a good idea to get rid of most of it in the near term, as the going got a bit thin, depending solely on the allowance, from week to week.
Good training in financial management.
Some years ago, at my display re: making money work harder ... pay less taxes ... at a fall fair, when one guy asked what right I had to call myself a financial advisor, when I said that all that I had to sell was to look at money a little differently than he did, as if we thought alike, he wouldn't pay me to listen to me, and if I thought very differently ... he'd not agree to trust advice re management of his precious money to that flake! ...
... and that where I began to learn how to manage money ... was when I grew up on the farm.
When he said that had nothing to do with it ... I said that, oh, yes, that it did - for most farmers look at money entirely differently than do most city folks.
ole joyfuelled ... with a bit of help from wheat ... and milk ... from time to time
glenda_al
Georgysmom
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