Look how far farming has come

It was a century ago when my father, Leland Spencer, finished high school at Mexico, Missouri.

Jobs were scarce.

A few years earlier, an older brother had migrated to Northwest Iowa, a distance of over 500 miles, and found work on an Iowa farm. He wrote to my father suggesting he come to Iowa and search for a job — any kind of a job.

His older brother also told him times were better in Iowa than in Missouri. The word was farmers in Iowa were riding behind their implements, while in Missouri they were still walking behind them.  

Once in Iowa, my father found his first job on a farm south of Churdan picking corn by hand for Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Kinsman for two cents a bushel plus room and board.

In a good day, he could pick 100 bushels a day and with a scoop board, shovel it in a crib.  He used a traditional, 36-inch wagon with a high bang board pulled with a well broke team of horses.  

The wagon held 36 bushel of ear corn or 50 bushels of shelled corn.

While working for the Kinsman family, he had the good fortune of meeting Mrs. Kinsman’s younger unmarried sister, Fern.

Five year later in February of 1920 and after a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War I, Leland and Fern were married in the home of her parents, Oscar and Ella Stotts, at Churdan.  In that year they were given a grain-livestock 50-50 farm lease on the Stotts 640-acre farm north of town. Over half the farm was still in original prairie blue grass and yet to be broken. About l80 acres were in corn and oats.

In the fall of 1920, my father decided to buy his first mechanical corn picker. It was a horse-pulled ground driven one-row picker made by McCormick Deering Company.  His brother-in law, Fred Stotts, of Lohrville, owned a hardware store where these pickers were sold.

With a team of horses hitched to a hay rack, Dad drove the 10 miles to Lohrville and brought the new picker, which was yet to be assembled, home. The No. 3 picker came with adjustable snapping rolls, an eight roll husking bed and the extensive use of roller bearings. The picker was equipped with link chains; roller chains were yet to come as were grease zerks and grease banks. Lubrication was done with time consuming turn down grease cups twice a day.

It was a heavy machine weighing almost two tons.

With five head of horses on the picker and two more on a wagon pulled along the side, my dad must have thought he was in heaven being able to pick 300-plus bushels a day.  

At the crib he had an elevator, gone were the days of the scoop board. (A scoop board was a method of lowering the tailgate of the wagon to a level position allowing one to have a place to stand and thus scoop the load into a crib.)

The only complaint my dad ever had with his picker was the labor involved in getting all the horses harnessed and ready to go every morning. Also of concern was the number of lines one had to handle to drive seven head of horses — some quite spirited.

In a few short years, some farmers converted these pickers to use a Model T Ford engine which operated the machine part of the picker, but horse power was still necessary to move the unit through the field.

Lyle Spencer, of Goldfield, grew up near Churdan and graduated from Lohrville High School in 1949.