Threshing has a special place in farming folklore - and at the Ploughing

For a number of years, the threshing and baling display at the National Ploughing Championships has become a central part of the huge vintage display area. Threshing displays are also a feature of many vintage events across the country.

The reason for this is that threshing has a unique place among the Irish vintage and farming community. On many Irish farms, up to 50 years ago, the threshing process brought together neighbours and friends in an all-inclusive village event. And that’s why life around the threshing machine or mill has such an important place in Irish farming folklore.

Threshing was such a huge event on Irish farms; it involved all of the family. The crop had been cut by hand or by a binder and then stooked in the field to dry before being brought to the yard for storage in a large thatched haggard cock. It was then time to wait your turn for the threshing team to arrive.

Threshing was not as weather sensitive as today’s combine harvesting, as the crop was harvested and safely in storage. But there was still plenty of work involved.

The threshing season was from September until the following March. The threshing team often called to the farm three times during that period and only threshed enough for short-term storage, as the grain was easier to store in the haggard cock.

The threshing day was a special one in the village as the thresher moved from farmyard to farmyard. The neighbouring farmers came together until all of the threshing for the village was complete.

Setting the machine to be level and stable required some skill. In the days of steam power, getting the engine heated and running took extra time. Tractor pulleys made that part easier from the 1930s onwards.

Stories

During the threshing, there were stories to be told, and often a barrel of Guinness to be consumed as the thresher was fed and the bags filled and tied before being put into sheds for storage. And the women were busy in the kitchen feeding travelling droves of men. The children were entertained chasing the scurrying rats that emerged from the base of the haggard cock.

Farm safety was not the issue it is today, with belts openly powering the large machines. We cannot forget that there were dangers around the threshing process. While there were many near misses, there were serious injuries and some threshing fatalities that shocked close-knit neighbourhoods.

These threshing machines are probably the longest surviving machines on many farms and represent a technology that was invented by a Scottish engineer Andrew Meilke, in around 1786.

His invention of a machine to separate the grain from the stalks was to replace the flail system of grain separation that was in use for thousands of years, since the first crops of grain were grown. The thresher invention was a huge step forward for farmers, as flailing was time consuming and required a lot of labour.

The threshing machines brought their own issues as they displaced labour on many British farms and were believed to have been in some way responsible for labour unrest riots that took place in England in the 1830s. These threshers were then still hand-fed and were powered by horses.

In 1834, American inventors John Avery and Hiram Abial Pitts introduced some significant improvements to the thresher so that it could automatically thresh and separate grain from chaff. Three years later they were granted a patent for the development. Australian farmers were taking note. In 1843, John Ridley, an Australian inventor, is reported to have developed a threshing machine in south Australia.

Threshing machines or mills were sold in Ireland up until the early 1960s and the Ransome brand was probably the last to be offered for sale. In the earlier days, threshing mills were produced by Avery, Albion, Garvie, Marshall, Pierce, Ransome and Wright, to name just a few of the suppliers.

At that time, the Ransome machines were competing with the newly arriving combine harvesters, which got their name from the process of combining binding and threshing in one mobile machine. In 1955, 60 years ago, Ransomes offered seven threshing mills to Irish farmers. Prices ranged from £1,155 for the Type A, heavy 54in model that had a 4ft threshing drum, rubber tyres and required 28hp to drive it. This was a long machine, running to 6.3m (21ft), and was 2.4m (8ft) wide.

At the same time, the Claas Super Junior combine harvester, which was available from then Irish importers J McCullock & Sons of Ballyboughal, Co Dublin, cost £980. This was soon deemed to be a more competitive option as long as you had the 35hp of tractor PTO power available to drive it. Adding a David Brown engine from the price list for smaller tractors meant an extra cost of £240.

These early threshing machine competitors included combine harvester models that were initially horse-drawn in North America and were later towed by tractors. The tractor-towed models started to replace the threshers in Ireland in the 1950s and these were eventually replaced by the self-propelled combine harvesters that we have today.

Heritage

Threshing is a very special part of our farming heritage and is well preserved. It will be on view at Ploughing 2015 in the vintage display area with threshing mills from Brian Kelly of Borris, Co Carlow, and PJ Seymour of Laois in action over the three days of the event.

Stand and look at the process – it lasted for more than 200 years, virtually unchanged. It is the process that underpins the threshing structure of the new combine harvesters that you will see gleaming on the machinery stands.

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