By Ross Bloomquist
As February and March pass by the days become longer and the temperature starts to rise, the farmer begins to think of lining things up to go to the field. The first order of business is preparing the seed that had been saved from the previous crop and was stored in the granary. The grain usually contained some foreign matter such as wild oats, cracked kernels, imperfect heads, etc. This had to be removed before the seed was put into the ground.
The grain cleaning equipment was set up in an empty bin next to the stored grain. A small opening in the wall allowed the grain to flow into the bin that continued the fanning mill. This machine blew the lightweight material from the denser kernels.
The hand‑cranked "Hero" mill was a contraption about four feet square and 4 1/2 feet high. Most of the parts were wood or sheet metal. At the top a hopper holds the grain to be cleaned. The grain flows down through apertures in the hopper and baffles spread the kernels over a stack of reciprocating screens. These screens have round holes just large enough to let the wheat kernels drop through but retain the longer but slimmer wild oats kernels and imperfectly threshed heads. A single screen of this type is not 100% efficient and the stack of four or five similar screens are needed for a complete separation. The oversize material is discharged from the end of the screen in a pile on the floor.
The wheat kernels passing through the stack of screen fall through a long slot to encounter a gentle blast of air from a two-foot diameter flat bladed fan the width of the machine. Hence the name "fanning mill." The falling kernels are freed thereby of light fluffy material such as chaff and dust. The kernels land on and move down another sloping reciprocating screen with long but narrow interstices. Small but dense seed such as those of pigeon grass and shriveled or cracked kernels pass through this screen. The cleaned wheat retained on the screen is shaken off the end onto the floor and then scooped up in a bushel basket. When the basket is exactly full it is dumped into a small temporary bin. As each bushel is emptied a tally is made on the smooth flat side of a studding. The tallies are short vertical strokes made side by side with a dull pencil or possibly a nail. The fifth tally is marked diagonally across the other four. The total can be obtained easily by counting the groups of five.
Sometimes the grain was run through the mill a second time for better cleaning. Turning the crank is tiring work since considerable energy is expended in supplying the power needed to keep the fan turning at a fairly fast and constant rate and the screens oscillating properly. Usually the mill was operated only 3 or 4 hours in the afternoon after all the morning chores had been done. The hired man turned the crank while someone else filled the hopper, handled and tallied the clean grain and bagged the rejected material. This stuff was fed to the chickens. When the ground conditions were such that the field was ready to plant the first task was to prepare the seedbed for the seeds. The hard surface and clods left by the previous year's plowing and by the winter snows had to be broken up before the seeding could proceed. A spike tooth harrow, always called a drag, was the implement used. A spring tooth harrow was sometimes employed if the ground was exceptionally hard or in other seasons to destroy the growth of weeds. The spike tooth harrow consists of a number of sections of wood framework with metal teeth to dig into the ground as the implement is pulled (dragged) over the surface. Each section is a wood latticework made of three-inch square hardwood members about 4 feet in overall dimensions. At 6 or 8 intervals the teeth, actually square metal spikes about 10 inches long protrude from the bottom of the framework. The teeth are 3/4 inches square and taper to a rounded point. The sections are parallelogram shaped and the teeth so arranged that they are not in line as the section is pulled forward over the ground. A single section is light enough for a man to live by the side when it is necessary of clean out the debris that sometimes collects around the teeth. The usual drag is comprised of five sections all attached through short chains to a draw bar made of wood and reinforced with metal along the edge. A five-section drag works a strip about 30 feet wide. It is pulled by five horses walking abreast.
The practice in those days was to drag the field twice, once in the same direction as it had been plowed and then crosswise before seeding and once again after the seed was in the ground. Dragging was a relatively fast operation and an 80-acre field by one fourth mile could be gone over in a day if 10 round trips were made morning and afternoon. It was easy enough for the drag to keep ahead of the seeding operation. Dragging was a lonely, boring job. There was little to do except to guide the horses and watch out for stones that might have heaved up in the winter.
As soon as 40 acres or so of a field had been dragged the seeding of the wheat began. The farmers usually operated the implement which was always called a "drill". He seldom delegated the job to the hired man whose rows might wander away from the straightness which was always a mark of a good farmer. The noun drill refers to an implement for planting seeds in a row. The implement was drawn by four horses hitched side by side and was about 12 feet wide and seeded a strip 11 feet wide. The seeding mechanism was supported on a frame with two large iron tiered wheels at either end. The seed was contained in an elongated hopper with multiple outlets spaced seven inches apart which discharged the seed into the ground through a metering device. At the lower end of the outlet a rotating grooved roller carried away a small number of kernels in each groove and dropped them into a flexible tube made of helices of spring steel. The rotary motion of the rollers, all on a single shaft, is powered by a chain and sprocket wheel arrangement from a large supporting wheel on the drill. The rate of delivery of the kernels is controlled by the width of the grooved roller in contact with the kernels in the hopper. This adjustment is made by a lever which caused a sleeve to cover all or part of the grooves. The lever had an indicator for setting the rate of delivery of the kernels to compensate for their size and for the amount to be seeded per acre.
The seed drop into a narrow trench formed by either "shoes" or "disks". The shoes are arranged in a line 7 inches apart; each one consists of a pair of hardened steel plates which gouge a u‑shaped trench several inches deep in the soil and packed the ground at the bottom of the trench. The seeds dropping from the metal tube into the trench are covered with dirt by a chain alternating large and small round links attached to the rear of the shoe. The depth of the trench was adjustable to some extent by the lever which raised and lowered the entire shoe. This lever also disengaged the feed mechanism when the implement was being moved from field to field and while turning around at the edges of the land being seeded.
The operator of the drill walked behind the implement in the early days. The somewhat newer disk models had a substantial shelf or platform about a foot wide raised about the same distance above the ground and attached to the frame of the drill and independent of the disks. The driver standing on this platform could guide the outside horse in the track of the previous round and still step off easily without halting the horses.
The clean grain stored in the granary was sometimes brought out to the field in a grain tank. A more convenient method was to bag the grain and bring it to the drill in sacks. In the evening or during the noon hour sufficient grain was shoveled into bags in the granary.
After all the rounds had been finished in a field the turning space at either end was seeded by a trip crosswise back and forth. After dragging again the work in the field was complete until harvest time three months or so later.
Source: A History of Foster County 1983 Page 93