Harvest mechanization: Part I
REMEMBER WHEN
Well … here we are Autumn of 2016. Gorgeous weather and leaves beginning to turn. Then on the other hand we have dead potato tops in the fields and the smell of fall in the air. Soon we will see the bulk trucks and harvesters on the roads and in the fields.
I was speaking with a lady in church the other day and we were reminiscing about harvests past. Now, I may be wrong, but I believe the elder gentleman I spoke with concerning a tool that was horse drawn and a fall implement. It looked like a spade from a one-row digger with the curved brackets of a land plow that was bolted to a pair of arms that in turn were attached by chains to a whiffletree. This item also had a pair of handles like an old land plow had so that the horseman could control where it was.
It was told to me that this was an early form of potato digger. It would go in under the spuds in the ground to loosen them in the soil and allow them to be found, picked and barreled in the field.
Then we graduated to a one-row potato digger that incorporated the use of gears and lags that turned as the wheels of the digger moved over the ground shaking the potatoes out of the dirt and depositing them on the ground to be picked. Soon these one-row diggers were piggy backed by a one cylinder gas engine to turn the lags as the horse pulled it through the fields depositing the potatoes behind it to be picked. As tractors were coming on the scene we witnessed the advent of the two-row potato digger. These machines did the same as the one-row diggers they just used the power takeoff on the tractor to do the locomotion for the lags and could dig two rows at a time – doubling production.
As things progressed to more mechanization, the one-row harvester was brought to be. These machines were tractor drawn and ran off the power takeoff but they used barrels instead of bulk haulage. They were labor intensive as people were used on the machines to sort and pick out rocks, tops and mud from the crop which was barreled and loaded on a truck to go to storage.
The next machine to appear was the two-row harvester. These machines were unique in that a truck with a hopper on the back as a body drove alongside the harvester in the field and a conveyor loaded the potatoes into the hopper and did away with the barrels. The body of the truck had a conveyor belt or bed of lags in the bottom to unload the truck with.
Be watching next time for part two of the harvest mechanization.
Guy Woodworth of Presque Isle is a 1973 graduate of Presque Isle High School and a four-year Navy veteran. He and his wife Theresa have two grown sons and five grandchildren. He may be contacted at lightning117_1999@yahoo.com.
