Days Gone By

Over the past several months I have been driving my Dad back and forth from Kentucky to the Cleveland Clinic through the states of Kentucky and Ohio. During those drives I have had the wonderful experience of hearing about my Dad growing up on a farm and many of the jobs he did on the farm – milking cows, delivering milk, plucking chickens, planting tobacco plants, cutting tobacco.

Today, I learned something new. While driving down I71 in Ohio between Columbus and Cleveland I noticed a field where the corn was set up all across the field in little tee-pees. I asked my Dad what it was. He said they were cornshocks and that’s the way they used to harvest the corn when he was a boy. Then he started thinking for a minute and said, “you go to the center and tie four stalks together then you cut the stalks in a square 16 rows out in each direction and tie them to the original four. The shocks are left in the field until the corn is need to feed the farm animals. He said that when he was a boy they used to do it at night by the light of the moon. If you did it during the day when it was dry the leaves on the corn plants would tear your arms up like razors. So they worked at night after the dew was on the plants to soften the leaves.

How’s that for some agricutural history.

Here’s a link the a University of Kentucky article on this old method of harvesting.

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