Harvesting Western Grain, Postcards x5 +1

To produce a given quantity of wheat today requires 2% of the labour needed 100 years ago. That is what an author said this week, as he was promoting his book about Artificial Intelligence. Poking around on the internet, I found other similar calculations and assessments. (Actually, our collective inability to control AI will probably end up in something like Colossus, The Forbin Project starring Hans Gudegast - but I digress.) 

The optimistic would say that this labour - surplus to grain production - is then freed for other roles in society and our standard of living therefore increases. These postcards will look at some of the historical steps which soaked up that original 98% of the labour. 

When visiting Portage la Prairie in September (in the 1990s), we were often disappointed to find that 'the harvest' had been completed before the time of our arrival. Short-stalked, faster-growing, early-maturing varieties of wheat ... and modern agricultural practices such as aerial spraying with Roundup enable farmers to harvest in the summer - rather than in autumn. 

This modern 'rush' to harvest decreases the potential for crop losses because the whole process still depends on the weather, and nature in general. The longer the old, tall, traditional amber waves of grain, uh, waved ... the greater the chances were that they would be spoiled by insects, disease, wind, hail and heavy rain.

Loss of topsoil and drought - a couple of old favourites - will unfortunately come back to haunt the Prairies as the climate changes.

The first card mentions the CPR by name (see above).

At a fairly large prairie town (traditionally measured by the number of grain elevators) each grain reaper-binder works to cut, bunch and bind (with twine) a sheaf of wheat. The sheaves are arranged in stooks, with the butts down and the grain in the air to facilitate drying.

Without horses, modern harnesses and ground-driven steel machinery (i.e. requiring more horse tractive effort) - the process would require even more labour. 

... Before these advanced technologies one person would cut the grain plants with a simple scythe or sickle. Another would bunch the fallen grain and use a few of the wheat stalks to tie it into a relatively smaller sheaf for drying. Fancy scythes had wooden cradles which would catch the plants as they were cut and thoughtfully leave a bunch for the person making up the sheaves.

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Here is what everything looks like from the back. These are Canadian-built Massey-Harris harvesters at work. Given the number of people then living on farms, and the importance of grains in the rations of horses, cattle and poultry ... reaper-binders may have been as common then (per capita) as gasoline-powered snowblowers are today in Canada. 

A nation's economic strength was often measured by its ability to produce steel domestically. The federal government often paid generous bounties to companies willing to set up steel mills in Canada. Before income taxes were common, a comprehensive system of import tariffs provided much of the government's income. In the early 1900s, items manufactured with steel (eg. farm and railway equipment) were often protected by high tariffs. This was intended to ensure that domestic companies prospered from the western settlement boom and provided 'hi-tech manufacturing jobs'.

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Perhaps, the note on this postcard was written by an American scouting out cheap Canadian land in the 'Last Best West' - as it was then promoted. The CPR had those massive land grants intended to help finance its early years of low-traffic wilderness railroading. It seems likely that low-cost excursions were provided by the railway to attract anyone of means who might be tempted to farm here.

The wheat grew tall on the newly-broken prairie, which had built up centuries of rich grassland humus. But tall wheat was a pain in the neck. It was more likely to be knocked down by bad weather to become 'lodged'. After the stalks and heads of wheat had been driven down to the ground, they were usually beyond salvaging when the reapers passed. 

The stooks would often need to be taken apart and rebuilt - to ensure the grain was properly and evenly dried before threshing. Harvest excursions brought farm labourers from the east and they were often employed, as above, to manhandle the sheaves for better drying - particularly if weather conditions had been poor. 

In the image above, all that massive quantity of plant material as far as you can see looks very impressive. But the labourers aren't enjoying themselves in this hot, heavy, skin-prickling work. And the farmer is only going to get paid for the kernels of wheat - not for all the straw coming from the dried-out plant stalk. 

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... The straw wasn't economical to transport very far to serve as bedding for animals in barns. However, this steam tractor is probably able to burn just about anything as fuel - including waste straw. 

Travelling at a very low rate of speed, these gangs would sometimes follow the harvest from south to north. Behind the tractor, the threshing machine and the cookhouse are being towed. The wagons would be used to haul the sheaves of wheat to a central threshing location on the farm - the wagon loading providing more work for the farm excursion labourers.

Without the practised finesse of their British cousins, you can see that the Valentine postcard artists have roughly cut off the image at the horizon and placed the subjects on a pre-made sky background.

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Looking at the Google railway map of today, we can see that the stations west of Scott are ... Tako, Unity, Vera, and Winter. You can check AI to see if it can tell you which railway built through here. Or, if you know already, please feel free to make up your own joke about 'ChatGTP' and give yourself 100 bonus points!

This looks like a petroleum-burning tractor. Its belt-drive is transferring power to the almost hidden threshing machine via that huge, reinforced leather drive belt. All the sheaves are being transported here on the wagons. Workers then fork the individual sheaves onto the threshing machine's conveyor. After some mechanical magic, kernels of wheat flow from the machine into 100 pound bags - which you can see loaded on a buckboard wagon at the left. The straw is blown into a pile.

Hey Fellas! ... In the World of the Future ... they'll figure out how to bale straw and it will be sold at 'big box stores' charging $30 for 1/4 of a standard bale. Yeah, really! People will use the bales as front-door Halloween decoration ... in places called ... 'the suburbs'! 

The most important eliminator of that '98% of wheat farming labour' was automation powered by portable, powerful, petroleum. 

Horse-powered equipment provided only limited automation (cutting and binding the stalks). New petroleum-powered engines, moving petroleum-powered combine-harvesters ... would be able to operate through fields of harvest-ready grain. 

A powered combine had a greater capacity than the horse-drawn equipment (and the horses) so a farm's grain could be harvested when it was ready - in just a few days. On the dry Prairies, if there was no evening dew, the combine could work all night. The combine eliminated the need for separate binding, stooking and threshing operations.  

The combine also supported bulk handling of the grain - augering the grain into horse-drawn wagons. Eventually, the remaining labour of horse-husbandry to support horse-cultivation, horse-seeding and horse vehicle driving was made obsolete through the widespread use of petroleum-fueled tractors and trucks. 

from: Canada Handbook 1950; Dominion Bureau of Statistics.

About 50 years later ...

The image darkens into the book gutter at the left, but you get the idea.

A caterpillar tractor (rear, left) and a rubber-tired tractor (right) are towing two motorized combines.

Four workers are needed to harvest.

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from: Province of Saskatchewan, Its Development & Opportunities; FH Kitto; 1919; Department of the Interior, Canada. 

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The Wild Card ...

Kaiser Ferdinand's Northern Railway

... was the name that Salomon von Rothschild chose for the enterprise ... 

after he was granted the unlimited privilege from the Kaiser (Emperor) of Austria/etc. to build it.

The railway imported locomotives and support personnel from Stephenson's works in 1837.

(Similar to the motive power acquisition process of the Champlain & St Lawrence.)

This particular Vienna station (above) was built in 1866.

It was badly damaged in 1945 and its ruins were demolished in 1965.

The date of the postcard image and the map below are one year apart.

On the map, lines connecting city points represent railways.

Initially, the railway was to run from Vienna, into Moravia and Silesia for iron and coal,

and on to Buchnia (near Cracow in western Galicia) for salt.

Roughly, this route forms a gentle clockwise arc from Vienna around that yellow border of Hungary.

According to Wiki, the line was profitable by 1841 and the shares were above par two years later.

... Generally, securities were placed with the deal's underwriters at a discount to par (par = the face value of 100) 

before a public offering was made.

This example of this railway set off a local railway building boom.

from: Handy Reference Atlas of the World; JG Bartholomew; 1904; John Walker & Co.

Portage 1985 - Fourth Section

This post will end up in Portage, 

but first a digression to a museum 50 kilometres south-east of Winnipeg.

The era ...

Postcard mailed 1908

This rough postcard was mailed in 1908. The remaining hand-painted pigments are therefore more than a century old. 

Oak River is 11 miles north-west of Rivers, Manitoba and was on the CPR Miniota Sub (Brandon to Miniota - 1967 data). Photographed from the next country elevator on the elevator siding, the camera was tilted just a little - it must have been an interesting balancing act. Until the farmers' pools and co-ops were formed a little later in history, private companies made a profit from handling grain.

I think it was a fairly common practice to have the CPR station facing south and opposite the grain elevator. Today the village of Oak River has no railway, but a broad 'park' exists where the railway and its facilities once existed.

At least twice over the years we visited the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach, Manitoba.

Both the Mennonites and the Hutterites are named after their founders. Two years earlier during a visit to Horseshoe Curve at Altoona, Pennsylvania we had taken a trip to nearby Lancaster and learned a little about another living and active anabaptist movement - the Amish. 

Any further generalization I try to make about these groups may be misleading - for example, some embrace internal combustion engines, some do not. To some extent, particularly in the past, their traditional German language helped preserve their identity as it also served to protect them from outside malign influences. 'Language' will come up again below.

Being an isolated self-contained agricultural community - and this applied to most early prairie settlers - it was really beneficial if most of your needs for metal fasteners, horseshoes, and other hardware could be met by making them to order locally. (For a moment I thought this was a photo of my spouse's current workshop - I should have recognized the warning signs)

Here is an interior of a typical early prairie home at the Mennonite Heritage Village museum.

Quilting is being demonstrated.

Although I don't have photos of this building's exterior in this batch, here is the milling area of the museum's windmill. Two halves of a grindstone appear near the wall. Close to the camera is a working grindstone with the wooden hopper into which the grain was poured. The large interior driving wheels and even the gear teeth of this mill are fashioned out of wood.

My uncle has brought us to survey their collection of steam traction engines. Steam engines in 1900 were generally powered with heat-dense coal, but on the prairies even plentiful waste straw (aka 'biofuel') was used to fire these engines. While you might think these metal wheels would be hard on the paved or macadamized roads, there were very few of the latter around to damage.

We now leave the museum.

Unused J Valentine and Co Canadian Pacific postcard, c1910?

Here is another postcard which was hand-coloured in Britain by artists who never saw the original subjects (sadly). 

Horse-drawn binders have cut and bound the wheat in sheaves. The sheaves are piled in stooks to dry and until the labour and equipment can be concentrated on threshing. Compared to today's wheat, the plant stalks separating the seed heads from the ground are very long.

Valentine postcard mailed in 1911.

Scott is 42 miles west of Biggar Saskatchewan on the CNR main line.

By the looks of it, this is a gasoline tractor and its power take-off wheel is being used to transmit energy through that huge flopping belt which leads over to the threshing machine. 

Horse-drawn wagons bring in the dried sheaves of wheat. They are forked onto the threshing machine conveyor and, in a series of steps, the machine beats the grain loose ... from the straw and the outer parts of the wheat 'flower'.

The wheat ends up in bags on that light blue wagon, the straw and chaff end up in piles where they will likely be burned.

A modern machine which combined the cutting and threshing steps above into one operation was called a combine.

Around Portage, circa 1990, the straw was often ejected by the combine into tight windrows. Sometimes farmers - following traditional practices - burned the windrows of straw ... and acrid straw smoke filled the air for days. This created an often serious pollution, highway visibility, and public health problem. 

While hay contains dried grass and/or dried legume (e.g. clover, alfalfa) stalks, leaves and seed heads - straw is only the yellow cellulose stalk. Although ruminants can digest the cellulose, the straw is much less palatable than good hay. So straw is used mainly for absorbent animal bedding.

from: Historical Atlas of Manitoba; 1970; Warkentin and Ruggles; Manitoba Historical Society.

'The map shows the areas in which the Mennonites settled in Manitoba, and the location of the farmer-operator villages which are known to have existed in the 19th century.' Steinbach is marked.

from: Historical Atlas of Manitoba; 1970; Warkentin and Ruggles; Manitoba Historical Society.

A section from JC Hamilton's map of part of western Canada, 1876.

'Books on the prairies written during the settlement era were generally accompanied by maps of indifferent quality. This is a characteristic map, intended to provide the general reader with the information he requires for following the material in the book ... This map has glaring errors, such as the indication of a main CPR line west of Selkirk, which was never built ...' 

[Note that this was to be the projected 'Canada' Pacific - the original government railway of the Pacific Scandal - not the CPR which was later built by the Syndicate of Angus, Hill, Stephen et al. Sandford Fleming, the Chief Engineer of the CPR, advocated the northern route through Yellowhead Pass - this was later rejected by the Syndicate ... Another interesting detail: As the original owners of the Pembina Branch, some members of the Syndicate profited handsomely from their temporary monopoly on rail transportation to Winnipeg - the Pembina Line connected with US railroad network.]

'The map correctly indicates the two Mennonite reserves. The French Canadian reserve near Emerson never existed.'

Again, you can see Steinbach's location marked - it is to the right of Steinreich and under the 'B' of Manitoba.

In the south-east corner of the map, reference is made to the North West Angle of Lake of the Woods ('NW Angle'). The disputed location of this survey benchmark arose after the original survey undertaken as a result of the Treaty of Ghent (1814) ... and the later fight between the Hudson's Bay Company and the American government ... all to determine where the boundary should lie from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods. It became a very long story ...

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From serious history to less serious history ...

Screencap from '49th Parallel' (1941).

If you like seeing, hearing, collecting and swapping Canadian stereotypes, the movie for you might be the Oscar-winning 49th Parallel - available on iTunes. This 1941 British propaganda film came out just in time for the American entry into World War 2. It shows many NFB-style examples of Canadian scenery and you can feel the CPR's helpful hand in its selection of some vistas. It is written up in Wikipedia if you want to investigate further.

Laurence Olivier is Johnnie the French-Canadian trapper (with an accent) and both Canadian Masseys can be seen/heard in it.

In the screencap above, fugitive 'ethnic Germans' from a sunk U-boat have presented themselves as a gang of itinerant farm workers at an 'ethnic German' Hutterite colony in Manitoba. The colony has given them work and shelter - at least until all this Nazi business started. According to Wikipedia, filming took place in a real Hutterite colony.

Read the body language of the audience (above) after the self-revelatory call to action by the Nazi group's leader. At great length, the differences between the Nazis and German society of the late 1930s ... and the steadfastly pacifist Hutterites ... are compared and contrasted in the script.

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After a long day for the driver and an interesting day for us, the Trans-Canada and the CNR lead back to Portage.




The extra 5382 west rumbles by the Portage CN station.
A load of empty coal hoppers is in tow.

The extra 5270 east rolls by Kearns.
Loaded coal hoppers form the consist.

With the camera facing west at CNR Kearns (which is to the left), a CP main line eastbound coal train crosses the CP/CN diamond at the horizon.

Extra 5570 west passes the Portage station ...

... heading for the Gladstone Sub.