long winter math
Some parts of the United States are having record snowfall, while here in Montana, it's been 50 degrees and sunny. Still, I've been thinking about The Long Winter and the legendary "fetch the wheat and save the town" trip.

Laura wrote that Cap and Almanzo hauled sixty bushels of wheat from where a farmer was storing it (for seed) twenty miles from De Smet. LIW told how much that wheat weighted when she wrote that Pa paid for a 2 bushel sack of it, and Almanzo noticed that Pa didn't swing it up on his shoulder like a man normally would. "A man doesn't like to admit that he couldn't lift 125 pounds." So the wheat weighted 62.5 pounds per bushel.

The weight of wheat can vary up to 50 pounds per bushel based on moisture content. At 62.5 pounds per bushel, the wheat was about 17% moisture. There are all sorts of tables used to calculate that sort of thing; I didn't do the math.

So the sixty bushels Almanzo and Cap hauled weighed 3750 pounds. At 30 bushels per sled, that was 1875 pounds per sled. We know how it was supposedly packed: two bushels per sack. Any way you look at it, 1875 pounds was a lot of weight for one man to load repeatedly for twenty miles.

Can you visualize the SIZE of a bushel sack of wheat? Or a two bushel sack of wheat? Most people don't buy "by the bushel" these days, but here's a way to visualize the amount wheat supposedly hauled in The Long Winter based in terms of something most people can visualize: gallon milk jugs or 2-liter soft drink bottles. :-)

1 US bushel = 1.24445608 cubic feet
The volume of a bushel of wheat (how much space it takes up) is usually calculated today at 1.25 cubic feet per bushel. So 60 bushels would equal 75 cubic feet of wheat.

1 US bushel = 9.30917793 US gallons
60 bushels of wheat would fill 558 gallon milk jugs (with a little left over).

1 bushel = 35.239072 liters
60 bushels of wheat would fill 1057 two-liter bottles (with a little left over).

I don't know... For some reason, 558 gallons of wheat "seems" like more than thirty 2-bushel sacks of wheat, doesn't it?
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:30 PM