Harvest Tales - Cheyenne County
Harvest stories submitted by Kansans for the online exhibit, Wheat People.
Submit your own at kshs.kansasmuseum@ks.gov.
Martin Busse
We Used to Bind an Awful Lot of Our Grain
We used to bind an awful lot of our grain. We needed the straw for baling, and some of it for feed. . . . My Dad had a threshing rig and we'd go around threshing for all the neighbors. We'd thresh our own first. . . . We might thresh for four weeks in the hot of the summer. . . . My dad got a combine in 1924, and most of the people were still using headers. . . . After we got the combine, we still used the binder for oats for feed. . . .
We used to have to depend on neighbors, you know. Whenever anything went wrong or you needed any help, you always depended on a neighbor. Now, everybody's got their own equipment and they're pretty independent, and they don't really care if the neighbor knows what they're doing or not.
