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Farmer Boy, Chapter 25

Social Studies
Inventors (Threshing) 
Harvest time on the farm meant socializing and hard work. Although Almanzo and his Father did this it was often coordinated between farms to thresh the wheat on each farm.

The amount of workers needed meant that neighbors often cooperated together to thresh small grains such as oat or wheat. When the threshing was done, the farm family knew what kind of yield their labor produced, and whether it would be a lean or prosperous year.

Until the early 1800's, wheat was grown and harvested very similar to the ancient Egyptian way of farming. Farmers harvested wheat by hand with a sickle. They tied the stalks into bundles to be threshed. Livestock trampled the stalks or farmers beat the stalks to loosen the grain from the stalks. The grain was tossed into the air, and the chaff blew away. This left only the kernels behind. This process was called winnowing.

In 1834, Cyrus McCormick, an American inventor, patented a reaping machine. Two brothers from Maine also invented a threshing machine in 1834. The development of these machines allowed farmers to do the work that once took several days in only a few hours. Another advancement that helped in the production of wheat was the development of the steam engine in the 1880's and the internal combustion engine in the 1920's. Animals did not need to pull the farm equipment anymore. The use of machines allowed farmers to plant larger areas of wheat and harvest it in a shorter amount of time.

From the late 1800s into the 1930s, many American farm families worked together to thresh grain using a steam engine and a threshing machine. Threshing is the process of knocking the grain off the straw, and by the late 1880s implied separating the grain from the chaff. A day of threshing grain often meant the women on the farm had to prepare a meal for more than a dozen men. In the field, it required a crew to load the wagons with grain, feed bundles into the threshing machine, stack the straw, and haul away the clean grain. Before the threshing machine was invented and accepted among farmer, the separation of the grain from stalks and husks was done by hand with flails just like Almanzo and his Father did.

Almanzo wondered why Father didn’t hire a machine to do the threshing because it was faster. His Father replied, “That’s a lazy man’s way to thresh…” “Haste makes waste, but a lazy man’d rather get his work done fast than do it himself.” His Father was concerned with quality and would rather take the time to do things correctly than just get them done.

Today threshing is done by machines. It still requires hard work and many people, but it is much faster and efficient.

Science
Inventing 
Father chose to thresh the wheat by hand instead of renting a threshing machine. Threshing was the act of removing the seed from the husks and sifting out the straw. Threshing machines were fairly new inventions at that time. They have come a long way in becoming more efficient. Inventors are always thinking and tinkering, trying to come up with the next invention. Many people didn’t understand or agree with a lot of new inventions, as people in general don’t like change. Inventors were often ostracized for thinking outside the norm.

How do you think like an inventor? Inventors see a problem and  Inventors take the time to dream, relax and tinker. They take chances, overcome failures, and learn from their mistakes. A fun book to read about inventions is Mistakes That Worked by Charlotte Foltz Jones.

Try to come up with an invention of your own. To decide what kind of item you would like to invent, first ponder these questions: How will it work? Are there any others like it? Who needs your invention? What is your goal (make people’s lives easier, save lives, advance science, make money, etc)? What will it be named? How much will you sell it for? After going through the brainstorming process, draw your invention and write down the details. If you can, construct your invention and demonstrate how it works.

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