[music] Oh beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.

Kansas has long been known as the wheat state, the breadbasket of the country.

Titles that resulted with the perfect timing of immigrant farmers introducing a new breed of grain and technological innovations that allowed one farmer to feed many.

[music] So Kansas is known as the Wheat State.

For many years on a state license plate that said Kansas is a wheat state.

Wheat isn't a natural crop in North America.

Wheat came from Europe and wheat varieties were around in early days and wheat has drastically changed.

It used to be that a lot of the wheat used to be tall so that they could use the straw.

Straw is a very important byproduct off the grain crop.

But really for Kansas and what brought it into being a wheat state was we have to give credit to the Mennonites.

The Protestant Mennonites had been farmers for hundreds of years in basically Holland and Switzerland.

And they were moved out and they were peace loving people and they didn't like warfare.

Not only religiously but politically picked on a lot and even socially.

And so they first moved out to the Prussia region and there was a delta.

And they created this delta at the mouth of the river and developed it into a wheat country.

Well things happened there too and the Prussians decided they should be in military service which they were conscientious objectors greatly.

So Catherine the Great put them in Russia and said basically develop the planes of the Ukraine and do this.

So they did and they were very productive.

Well things changed again and with the Russian government they were going to conscript them again and they decided well we'll check out North America.

And the Great Plains is newly settled.

Well the timing was just right.

This was in 1873, 1874.

The Santa Fe railroad was building southwestern from basically Topeka down.

And with the old land grants for the railroads they had a lot of land to sell.

And so the first Mennonites came over at that time of the Russian Mennonites in late 1873 and a lot more came in 1874.

And with them they brought the Turkey Red Wheat.

These Mennonite farmers knew about selecting the seed to get the healthy seed and bring it over and plant it and see what it would do.

With the Turkey Red Wheat they had to do something so they established mills, flour mills.

And introducing the Turkey Red was just a first step.

There was wheat grown but most of that wheat even in western Kansas in the early days was what they called spring wheat.

It was planted in the spring and harvested in the fall like a lot of crops such as corn and things.

But the Turkey Red Wheat you planted in the fall and let it go through the winter and then harvest it in mid-summer.

And these Mennonites when they came over in 1874 there was the Grasshopper Plague that swept through the Great Plains.

They survived that.

There was a drought that followed it.

They survived that and so did their wheat.

So then the wheat became dominant and so all the high plains became dominant as wheat areas.

But it used to be when I talked about the oceans of grain out here it was.

I remember that as far as you could see in the farming country was wheat fields.

So at first the wheat harvest in the 1880s and even into the turn of the century was a very complicated thing.

And it lasted for a long time.

Wheat harvest now will last maybe a week or so because people have big combines and semis and stuff like that.

They didn't in those times.

So it was a deal to go out with a header basically, cut the stalks.

You shocked them and you could cut it green.

You could start in June.

If the wheat heads were developed and had the kernels or the seeds in them those would dry out and cure in the shock.

So you had bundles and then with the threshing machines they would take these shocks as a combination of bundles and run them through the thresher.

And the threshers were primarily were powered by a steam engine that was coal powered.

The thresher separated the kernels from the stem.

That went into a wagon.

And the mechanism of harvesting has changed because you had to have a lot of horses.

You had to have a lot of wagons because a lot of these wagons only haul about 50 bushel.

A semi will haul 1500 bushels.

The combines are big and so you have grain carts out there.

And that's constantly being developed to make them more economical as far as the speed because with that, bundling the wheat, shocking the wheat, threshing the wheat, hauling the wheat, took weeks to do it.

which one machine, the combine does it all now.

So we're going to talk to Howard Raymond.

We're here at Bird City, Kansas at the Threshing Show Museum.

It is an incredible place with all this machinery going up into the mid 20th century from the earliest parts of the early 19th century.

So you can see this in the development of even what was going on of going from one horsepower, which way the delivery systems were on these and how they worked, I'm glad that you mentioned the horse.

I don't know if I have the exact figures off the top of my head, but one horse would consume about 10 acres of product that the farms would produce.

And in the 1920s, they were close to 20 million horses on farms, which is substantial.

It amounts to about 10 percent of American farmland that was freed up, transferring into using tractors, combines and mechanical harvest help enable that.

We have here the very first McCormick Reaper that was designed in Virginia in 1831 that would be able to cut the grain off.

That's all it did at that time.

It had to be hand-raked off the platform, then gathered into sheaves hand-tied so they could carry it to the threshing machine or to the threshing floor to be threshed out.

This is a replica of an 1831 McCormick Reaper.

McCormick invented this machine in Rockbridge, Virginia in 1831 with several years in the development.

The very first machine, the sickle was smooth.

He later serrated the teeth.

It only cut in one direction.

It does not do a very good job.

And McCormick testified in court when he was trying to get his patents renewed that it didn't do a very good job.

His later improvements in 1847 and 1851 produced a sickle a lot more like we use today.

In 1931, International Harvester built 400 of these replicas for the Reaper Centennial.

We're very fortunate.

We have three of these Reapers here in our collection here at the Thresher Show in Bird City.

They are here on loan from the International Harvester Collectors Trust.

This particular machine, we did some modifications on it, so we were actually able to bring it outside and demonstrate it in the field.

The one that we have in the museum is completely all original, the original wood, which by now is almost 100 years old.

This one we put an iron wheel on so it was a little more substantial, put some more bracing on it.

We put a tractor hitch on it because we wanted to be able to pull it with the tractor and show how it operates in the field.

There's three important parts to a Reaper.

You've got the reel that brings the head, holds the wheat against the cutter bar.

You've got the cutter bar with the extended teeth points.

And then you've got the sickle that vibrates back and forth to cut the wheat off.

It falls on the platform and then is hand-raked off to the side by a man walking alongside using a rake.

It rakes it off into a sheath, which is later hand-tied with a wisp of straw.

The other important part of the machine is the divider board.

We've got a divider here, which as you go through the field, it splits the standing grain from the grain that's going to be cut.

So it's not tangled together.

In 1847, Cyrus McCormick went to Chicago and began production of this machine here.

This has got a cutter bar on it, very similar to what is on our combines and mowing machines today.

It's a reciprocating knife with individual sections, replaceable sections.

The reel is another important part of the machine.

This brings the crop, holds it against the cutter bar as it cuts.

Then the divider board on the side that divides the standing grain from the grain that's going to be cut, these are principles that are used on every combine cutting machine today yet.

And of course, today's combines, this machine cuts what, seven feet, six or seven feet.

And today's combines cut up to 40 foot widths.

They're huge, huge machines.

And go a lot faster because these are wheel driven.

These are wheel driven.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And this would have been pulled with a horse.

And that would wear the horses down because you'd have to go at a certain speed to make this thing really functional.

Yeah.

So you'd wear out your horses and so there's a lot of rest with the horses and very slow, plus the expensive feeding horses and stuff.

This particular machine is 1847 one is primarily wood.

You have steel sickle bars and steel bolts in it.

Yeah.

And a steel drive wheel.

Yeah.

But that's about all.

It's basically a wood machine.

And here by 1900, the machines were all steel.

Yeah.

It took a while for that to transition.

This machine of 1847 was used up until about the time of the Civil War.

A man named Charles Marsh in DeKalb, Illinois, devised a machine with a canvas that would elevate the cut straw with grain up to a platform that was about tabletop height.

And two men could bind those bundles, tie them with a whisp of straw.

Two men could do that as fast as six men could follow behind on the ground gathering and picking up.

So that was a huge improvement.

And once they got to that point, they had the ideal platform to put a mechanical tie-er.

It took until sometime in the 1880s to get a suitable twine developed for the twine knotter.

And then we began to use a machine like this one back here.

We sewed Heritage Turkey Red Wheat last fall, and it was very dry last fall.

Some of it didn't germinate, but we've got kind of a spotty field here.

And we've got set up a 1940s international harvester McCormick-Dearing Grain Binder.

International Harvester was formed in 1902 of five harvester companies, harvester similar to this.

They cut the grain, they bound the grain.

Those five companies were McCormick, Dearing, Plano, Champion, and Milwaukee.

And they all went together and they formed International Harvester Company.

They built harvesters.

They sold these machines worldwide.

This machine, when we started with the horse machines, with the operator rode on the machine, guided the horse, also controlled the machine with these levers.

He was able to raise and lower the platform.

You were able to adjust how the wheat come into the tying mechanism.

And when we went to tractor operation, we still retained a man riding on the machine to control those functions of the binder itself.

The driver on the tractor, he simply guided the tractor, pulled the machine through the field.

What this machine does, it cuts the wheat off several inches from the ground.

It falls over onto the platform.

These platforms rotate.

It comes up, comes in.

There's a tying mechanism on here.

And it ties the wheat in a little bundle.

Those bundles will later come along.

We'll pick them up with pitchforks, throw them on a wagon, and then we take those to the threshing machine and thresh the grain out of the straw, out of the heads.

Take these heads and rub it in your hand and the little berries, blow a little on it, get the chaff out, and that's your wheat berries.

That's what you grind in the flour.

Okay, this is a 1930s era Bell City threshing machine.

In the 1920s, the company started building the threshing machines pretty much all out of steel, which was an improvement over the wooden threshing machines that they'd had in the previous years.

What this machine does is, like I showed you with the palm of my hand, it knocks the grain out of the head and then separates the wheat, the long wheat, and the chaff, and throws that out into another pile.

The wheat comes in, the pitchers on the bundle wagon or from a stack pitch the bundles onto the carrier here.

This is a moving carrier, brings the bundles into this mechanism here, which is a self-feeder.

They actually got big knives on them and they cut the twine on the bundle and helps distribute that.

And that comes down into the main piece of the machinery that knocks the wheat out of the heads, which is the cylinder.

Once the material comes through the cylinder, it comes out here onto some shaker racks that are shaken back and forth.

Any grain that's left, it can sift out through the bottom.

It comes on back through here.

There's another series of shakers back in here that clean what is called the clean grain shoe that finishes the cleaning process, sifting out the shaft from the wheat.

There's a big blower here that blows air in, it blows the chaff away.

And the clean grain goes into an auger here on the bottom.

Goes over to the other side and goes up and there's a weigher.

Each half bushel is weighed.

That's the way they kept track in the early day how much grain they harvested.

And that would go into a waiting truck or wagon.

The straw works its way on back to the back of the machine with these straw walkers that are on a rotating shaft.

And then there's a great big blower that's called a wind stacker.

That was an improvement that come into practice in the 1920s.

It would actually blow the straw with a big blower up through this pipe.

And this is made so it'll turn, swivel around, it raises up in the air.

And you can build a gigantic stack of straw with your machine still setting in the same spot.

You don't have to be moving all the time.

This machine here in 1902 remained on the market basically unchanged up through 1950.

By the time they got to this point where they had the steel machine, they had the twine knotter, precision parts.

Any one of these parts you could go to the dealership and buy that part ready made, ready to fit.

Everything was standardized.

They weren't made by hand.

They were made, everything was made by machine.

So parts off one machine would fit directly onto another machine.

We eventually put rubber tires on them so they transported easier.

But the basic design of the machine had never changed from this point.

They had it right when they got this far.

So in 50 years from this one here, the 1847, all wood model that we looked at, 50 years from that to this, another 50 years from this to the end of the thresher era when we started using combines in the 1950s.

The very first combine, that machine was a ground drive, had a big bull wheel and pulled with about 40 ahead of horses.

The Holt Company built horse-drawn combines out in California, in Stockton, California.

And by 1922, they had figured out how to make this machine powered by an engine and self-propelled.

This is a 1922 Holt Caterpillar Combine built in Stockton, California and delivered here to McDonald, Kansas by rail in 1922.

This machine has a 24-foot header, cuts the grain, brings it into the threshing mechanism.

The beater beats the grain off the heads, then it goes back into the shaking mechanism, sifts the grain away from the chaff and the residue of the straw and puts the clean grain into the tank up above.

This machine is driven by a large Caterpillar gasoline engine that's up on the front.

But this thing is massive.

I didn't know that the track wheels, I keep thinking that's more of a modern thing on combines, but this is getting that myth out of my head.

But the massiveness of this, and I'm guessing the steel parts are the weights to adjust the... Yeah, that's what this is, the counterweight beam to get the weight off your head.

So you had to have five guys?

You had to be raised and lowered by hand, that's what that capstone up on the front, that's to raise and lower of the head.

Another man sets in the seat and there's a flat wheel there, that's his steering wheel.

And then another man stands back here and these levers back here are the clutch and the gear shift.

In the early days, a lot of times the varieties of wheat, the Turkey Red Wheat that we talked about, was a taller wheat.

It didn't always stand well until it was fully ripe.

There was some advantage of binding it early and get it into a shock where it was fairly safe from weather, from hailstorms or wind damage that would destroy the crop if it were still standing.

So that was the major reason that most farmers didn't use combines until later up into the 1950s when we started developing some shorter straw hybrids.

This is a 1950s international harvester and this machine, if you'll notice, does a lot of the same things that the early reapers do.

This is the reel that would bring the grain in against the cutter bar.

It's got the cutter bar down underneath with the reciprocating knife.

It's got the dividers on either side to divide the cut grain from the grain that's being cut.

The grain is cut, then it flows up through the mechanism, goes into a big drum that rotates and beats the grain out of the heads.

And then that straw goes back into some shaking grates that further let the grain fall down through.

And then the grain falls down into another grain shoe, they call it, which further shakes and cleans the grain, cleans the fine chaff.

There's a big fan that blows the chaff out, puts the clean grain into the tank, and then there's an auger that can directly load it into a truck.

This combine right here, built in the 1950s, does the same thing as any combine built today in 2025.

The only difference being that the combines today are, of course, a lot bigger.

And then the other big difference, instead of using the shaker grates in a combine, in the last 20 years, major combine companies have gone to using a rotary threshing concept where the grain goes into a round cylinder container that is rotating.

And it is a perforated type of mechanism.

It's got some rasp bars on it, and that is bringing that grain around and around and around.

And it works on the principle of centrifugal force.

So it's doing the same thing as this machine is doing with the shaking.

But that grain can be expelled so much faster because it's got centrifugal force throwing that grain out to where it can be further cleaned and processed and put into the tank and put into the truck.

In 1880, 1900, I think there was somewhere around 80% of Americans lived on farms, lived and worked on farms.

And today it's less than 1%.

And that, with the tractor, with the improvements that we've had in machinery, the big combines that we have, that one farmer is feeding 196 people worldwide today.

He is literally feeding the world.

And that's all possible because of turkey red wheat and some of the other crop improvements that we've had.

People worry about the loss of farmland, but we're growing so much more food than we could possibly eat.

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