It has been a couple years since we had a good enough oats crop to actually get the threshing machine out and fire it up. We plant oats every year as the nurse crop for hay. All this means is as you put the hay seeds in the ground you also put oat seed in. The oats will grow faster and provide shade and moisture for the hay that will later take over the field. Bad storms have destroyed the crop for the last two years so it was a small success that this year we were finally able to see the crop through from planting to harvest.
The machine that we use to remove the seed from the stem and chaff is called a thresher. The Minneapolis Jr. machine that we use is over 100 years old and on loan from Dave Sniader. Basically what you do is hook the threshing machine up to a power source like a tractor and then feed bundles of oats into the machine. Inside the thresher the oat plant is struck hard enough to separate the seed from the left over material that is called straw. The seed falls into bags to be used for feed and the straw is blown into a pile that will be used for livestock bedding. It was a very dirty job but a fun one since we had such a good yield.
