not fit to feed stock

Father Wilder was correct; a threshing machine breaks the straw; no doubt about it. According to the New York State Agricultural Society in the year Almanzo Wilder was born, the recommendation was to "rub out" seed wheat by hand (do you think Almanzo did that with his Marshall crop?); it was better than wheat threshed by the flail, yet wheat that had been threshed by the flail was far preferable to that threshed by machine. The flail didn't crush the wheat kernels, and it was proven that when using a threshing machine, at least one-tenth of the kernels were either cracked, bruised, or had lost the wheat germ.

Of course, threshing by flail was a lot of work. One poem about threshing includes the following:

Sweating over his bread
Before he eats it; the primal curse;
But softened into mercy, made the pledge
Of cheerful days and nights without a groan."

Or, as Father Wilder put it: "All [mechanical threshing] saves is time, son. And what good is time, with nothing to do? You want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, all these stormy winter days?"

Prior to the introduction of threshing machines, one and a half bushels of seed wheat was generally used to seed an acre, but two bushels of seed threshed by machine were needed to give the same coverage, and often that was even a little thin. Farmers who had complained of feeble, unproductive stands of wheat found that when they switched to flailed seed that was plump and unmutilated, they got strong, healthy plants and a field full of grain. "As ye so, so shall ye reap."

One method of threshing that wasn't mentioned in Farmer Boy was that of "treading out" the grain by horses or even oxen, in practice from Biblical times until the end of the 18th century. An entire crop could be beaten out in a few days, securing the wheat from both insects and thieves (i.e. rats, mice, and little boys who like to chew it). Treading-floors were often permanent and from forty to one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, with a path or track at the outer perimeter being about twelve feet wide. The horses were led around and around by halters, kept in pace at a sober trot. Four horses could be on the treading floor at the same time. Three thousand bushels of wheat could be obtained in four days by four horses. It would take five men over one hundred days to do the same with a flail.

And those same four horses could walk in a circle and power a threshing machine, and accomplish the same results in a single day.
- posted by pioneergirl at 11:00 PM