This past weekend I got a real treat in getting to attend the Rock River Thresheree in Wisconsin. As someone who is really into both history and ag this was awesome. The surprising part for me was in the first 15 minutes there I saw three things I had never seen before.
Tobacco Harvest - It really is interesting to learn how farmers read the land to find the crops that it would be well suited to grow. I actually was very surprised to learn that tobacco was a somewhat serious crop in Wisconsin since I usually think of the upper south as it's home. According to some of the folks I was talking to tobacco grows well in the sandy soils that are plentiful in certain parts of the state. The type of tobacco they grew is used as the wrapper in cigars. The other thing that was interesting is that the seed for tobacco is tiny, almost like a radish seed.
Sorghum pressing - What I'm about to say will certify me as a true "Yankee" but I like maple syrup so much better than molasses on my pancakes. If you are one of those who really like molasses, like my mom (she can't help it she grew up in Missouri)then you would have really liked the sorghum exhibit. Sorghum looks a lot like corn but from the top it has a shoot that the seed pods fan out from. To harvest the crop you cut the stock at the base and then strip off all the leaves and press it to make a green liquid that can be cooked down. The process is just like making maple syrup and the cookers look the same too. After stirring the mixture over low heat for a few hours the sugars in the sorghum caramelize and give you rich, dark molasses. At the end of the tour they gave everyone samples. While I did give it a try it didn't sway me to leave my maple syrup.
Steam plowing - Plowing is one of those tasks that surely broke many a pioneer. If you have never worked a walking plow behind a team of horses or oxen I can tell you that few things seem so unnatural. When we watching the plowing demonstration we got to talking and came up with an astounding thought. Barring an error in our math it would seem that if you were to plow a 50 acre plot with a one bottom walking plow you would have walked a distance equal to plodding from Chicago to St. Louis. It is easy to see why the advent of tractors was so popular. In fact most of the early tractors only saw work in the field when it came to plowing because their wheels were too wide to travel the rows that the crops were planted in. At the Thresheree they had one of the earliest examples of traction plowing, a steam engine pulling a multi-bottom plow. Generally this wasn't used too much in the eastern Midwest where our fields were too small for these mammoths. They were much more common in the western wheat fields where the scale was much bigger.
Next year if you find yourself with a little extra time on Labor Day weekend I would suggest you make a trip to the Thresheree. I think you too will likely see something that you have never seen before.
