What did Jack Hargreaves find after the war?

so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] for endless ages our ancestors cultivated the soil by hand and in fact all the farm tools are derived from the hand tools if for instance you turn this round and you make it a great big pole that could pull be pulled between two oxen and put 10 blades on it instead of one then you've got a useful cultivator if you want to make a seed bed in the garden you use a rake and it's got a dozen or so teeth and they break the soil up fine once again if you were to turn that round and arrange it so the pole was a big one and it went up to an och yoke and put 150 teeth on instead of the 12 then you've got a harrow which does the same job with draft animals and it's still a tool that's all the time used on the farm but of course these are surface things that are done in the garden after the spade has dug the garden over and transferring to power operation the job that the spade does is the thing that beat them for thousands and thousands of years what does a spade do in fact it cuts first of all straight into the ground a straight cut downwards pretty hard after a drought but down it goes and then it breaks across at the bottom and then it lifts the soil up and turns it over and buries the trash and this they found very difficult indeed to do they couldn't reproduce it in a drawing motion what they could do is to have a heavy sort of grabbing axe and build it larger out of a big tree fork and put a iron tip on it and then drag it through the soil in a straight line it was called an aard and it was used in the days before there was a flower and all it did was to break the land up into clods and if you did the whole field two ways in two directions it would break it up into smaller quads this is what took a very long time to achieve the motion of the spade the job of the spade translated to a thing first of all a vertical cut will you do it with that knife which is called a coulter which is set to the depth of the furrow you want to cut so that represents the spade being pushed straight down into the ground and then you want a horizontal break or cut in this case and you do that with a horizontal knife which is called the plowshare and between the two they make an l-shaped cut so to speak they're cool to cutting downwards and the shear cutting across and so the soil is loosened and as the flower goes on the moldboard this is a lovely shaped curve thing metal now used to be wood which represents the shape of a plow to most people just turns it over and lays it upside down thus reproducing the work of the spain on the top there's another little player which is called a skim we just cut the edge off the furrow as it turns over and gets rid of any trash on the corner which might either grow on or spoil the look of a perfect piece of plowing it's a very subtle piece of gear despite the fact it looks quite primitive now there's one big wheel that runs in the furrow and one smaller one that runs on the land and they have to be set to the operation and then the draft can actually be sets like this cue either way according to the strength of the horses or whether you're plowing on a curve and the plowman he walked like this clink clonk clink clunk you could hear his boots on the way to the pub because he was used to going one foot in the furrow and one on the land and he had although it's missing from there in that notch a spanner and that spanner was the key implement because it's with that that he set the plow which was a process of tuning it like tuning a sailing boat and once he got it right to the power of his horses and the land and everything right he could do it so well he could tuck his lines under his arm and light his pipe and the plow would still pull on in a straight line and i found in an old book of my grandfather's about 1850 a beautiful seed engraving which shows perfectly what the plow does there you are you see cut straight down with the coolta cut straight across with the shear and then lift the slice and turn it all over and lay each slicer flying alongside the other so that you get the ploughing the furrows right across and it was a fine art people were very proud of doing it well you won't see this friend of mine doing it particularly clearly today because he's cutting thin stuff on top of chalk and he hasn't got this nice solid sort of butter cutting soil that farm and like you know for a competition but as i said the extraordinary thing about this was it took thousands of years to discover it the romans never discovered it they thought they were the great technicians they could produce central heating and aqueducts and so on but they only still had the old mediterranean art it was the belgian a nordic race 1500 years ago who brought this plow to england it was from them the romans learned it and we went on using it right up to the time i went away to the second world war to be a soldier we plowed the ground with it and sewed it and then we cut it with the binder machine which is another of the few bits of agricultural progress that happened between the belgian and me that threw it out in sheaves nobody knows what a wheat sheath is nowadays they think it's somewhere where you sell beer i think but the sheaves had to be picked up and put on stooks because you couldn't cut them fully ripe or you knocked all the grain out of them and doing it so they had to stand in the field they had to have what we call field room how much field room do they did it have they say 10 days you don't expect here room measured in time but that's what they said 10 days of field room and then even then all this had to be picked up and carted and then put in a stack and put in a barn it was put in a stack it had to be thatched until the winter when a thrashing machine came along with another gang of men and they spent days knocking the corn out of the straw and blowing the chaff out of the grain and producing the final product and this was still commonplace in 1939 over most of the farms in england but during the war we were up against the submarines we were fighting to keep the nation fed and the americans gathered all the tractors secondhand tractors they could from all over america and they put them in the liberty ships and at least then ships and they sent them over and by the time i came back from the war england was virtually a mechanized farming industry i can remember coming back in march 1947 and watching a playing match in which two young shah horses five-year-old won a playing match and they went off to the butcher the next day because there was still meat rationing and they were more valuable than meat than they were for work and the machine's taken over and the intervening time we have got from that to this this is one of the giant combines and in fact it's the first one of this particular giant model that has been in england and we watched it this year at work amazing [Music] on the front of this thing is sitting one man in an air-conditioned cubicle wearing a pair of earphones listening to a tape and watching a control panel which is telling him how many acres he's cut what the yield of grain is because the grain's already been thrashed out of it inside the machine what yield of grain is per acre and so on and you can see he's not taking much of the straw they grow a short store corn now because the corn straw hasn't got much use nowadays and uh even so they only take half of it off and they leave a very long temporary stubble s when we watched this man during this day he cut acres acres of 80 acres of corn at 1500 weights of the acre at 120 pound a ton for the grain that is to say over 30 000 pounds of corn in a day but you see that he left most of the straw behind and the store is a problem because this use of it has died off enormously the horses are now bedded on peat moss many of them the cows sit in cubicles bedded on sand the straw must be got off in the land and so we have the system of straw burning which has caused so much controversy over the last few years but the point is that the the corn even if it's dry if it even it may not be wanted must be good off the land in order that the machines can get in again and plow quickly in order to plant the winter corn which has a twice the yield of the spring floor and such straws does get saved from burning for use isn't picked up in sheaves like we used to or in half underweight bales you can chuck up in a barn it's picked up by this machine which is just about to excrete a gigantic circular bale of straw which not even five men could pick up let alone one man pick up with a fork and chuck onto a wagon but it doesn't matter the point of this is quite simple because not you all you do nowadays is put a spike on the front of the full loader of the tractor and just pick it up the girl could do it driving the tractor and he'd drive along instead of having to put 150 of these bales up on a wagon to take him into the farmyard he simply puts five and in no time the land is cleared and the plows are back on it if you walk across here for instance this in the last week of august here's a field which was cut yesterday morning and already the straw is off it and in veils and the grain is already in the field and in the barn and or the grain store and beyond that there are fields already plowed among standing corner the thing you never thought to see when i was young and over here through the gate and have a look at the gate too it's not the old eight foot or twelve foot farm grid it's a double gate with a removable post that opens wide enough for the biggest combine in the world to drive in and out there is a field which was standing corn at the beginning of this week which has been plowed already and is now being worked with a rotary cultivator and already this that was standing corn since the church bells last rang will probably be sown with next year's corn by tomorrow that is if they get a bit of rain tonight and the amount of change that this is made in the picture of the countryside these technical changes is quite extraordinary nobody realizes who didn't know before the war and if my father were to come out of his grave now i don't really believe that he would grasp that he was still in england on the 2nd of october last year i went into the agriculture merchants where they sell and service the machinery and found them not doing much and i said aren't you busy and they said no the harvest's over virtually i said what about the plan he said oh i think most of the plowing is done by the second of october and i remember that we used to walk about 18 miles behind horses to plow one acre of ground we used to hope for enough days of decent weather before the winter shut down in order to get a certain amount of winter corn in and then hope for an early tartner next spring in order to get the spring corn in before it was too late too late was 19th of april the day the cuckoo first calls all corn went in after that used to be called cuckoo oats and it didn't have much chance of growing and yet this last year there was no stubble left for the winter no stubble for the huntsman to gallop over all the parties to drop in because the machines can do it so fast now that the majority of the corn that was going to be harvested in england this year was still was already showing green last winter before any snow came to cover it [Music] if you enjoyed this program please subscribe and don't forget to click on the bell if you want to be notified when more videos are available and if you would like to buy the complete old country series of 60 programs please go to the link in the description below [Music]

Channel: Dave Knowles - filmmaker

Views: 26,285

Rating: 4.980392 out of 5

Keywords: jack hargreaves, out of town, old country, southern television, country programmes, jack hargreaves out of town, uk countryside, a country life, country life, farming, farming implements, country lifestyle, farming implements and their uses, ploughing, harvesting, combine harvester, corn, stooks, stubble burning, channel 4, Harvesting season

Id: WpRvcEC2fnY

Length: 15min 54sec (954 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021