It was a perfect day for harvesting oats.
A few clouds periodically blocked the sun, the temperature wasn't too hot and the air and fields were dry - things that aren't as important when you're working in the air-conditioned cab of a diesel-powered, four-wheel-drive combine.
But Scott Roemhildt, Leo Meillier and Jeff Huelsnitz were harvesting oats at the 1930s farm at Farmamerica near Waseca Friday. Everything they do on that farm, as well as the neighboring 1850s farm, is done the way it would have been done during those eras. So there were no towering combines in sight.
A straw hat kept the sun off Roemhildt's head when the clouds didn't, and a long-sleeved shirt protected the rest of his upper body. Dark cotton pants, held in place by suspenders, and heavy boots covered Roemhildt's lower half as he stacked bundles of oats into shocks in the field.
Nine bundles make a shock. Six bundles, stacked in two rows with the oats on top, are held up by two more bundles propped at the end of the rows. The remaining bundle is spread over the top of the eight standing bundles to protect them from the wind, rain and birds.
"Working out here you realize that, when the old timers talked about the good-old-days, they did it with a smirk on their face," Roemhildt said. "This is hard work."
Meillier is one of those old timers. He will turn 88 in October, but he looked as lively as a spring chicken while he operated a grain binder towed by the tractor Huelsnitz was driving.
The grain binder was a common piece of machinery on Minnesota farms around the turn of the last century. Its predecessor, the Reaper, which replaced the hand-swung sickle by cutting grain mechanically, was invented in 1831.
Reapers eventually evolved into grain binders when chains, gears and rollers were added to the side of the Reaper's platform. That mechanism gathers the oats and straw into bundles and ties them with twine.
The last feature added to the grain binder, a bundle catcher that holds about five bundles before dropping them in the field, was added in 1890.
Reapers and grain binders were pulled by horses before tractors were available. A large steel wheel that rolls on the ground provides the power for the machine. The last McCormick-Deering grain binder was made in the 1950s.
Meillier was 33 years old when he got the first combine for his Faribault farm in 1946. So he has plenty of experience to rely on when he volunteers to operate the grain binder at Farmamerica. He helped assemble the machines for dealers when he wasn't working on the farm.
"This was pretty technologically advanced at the time," he said. "Agriculture was done with hand tools for thousands of years before things started to change and the Reaper came along."
Back in the field of cut oats, Roemhildt lifts his hat, wipes the sweat from his forehead, pushes his spectacles back into place and looks around at the shocks around him.
"The work was hard then, but there's something pleasing about it," he said. "You sit on the binder and it sounds like a sewing machine. You make these shocks and when you're done, you look at the field and it's really picturesque."
Meillier said he has learned one thing about technology as he watched farming, and everything else, evolve during the last century. Besides keeping close tabs on the evolution of farm equipment, he has watched telephones evolve from being a rarity in rural homes to being the vital link to the World Wide Web.
"Once there's an inception of anything, it never gets to a point where there's no more improvements," he said. "When you try to analyze it, you don't know what could be next."
There are downsides, in Meillier's mind, to what technology has brought. Livestock production has increased dramatically, but it has come at a cost to the animals, he said. Large producers now keep their livestock in confinement buildings because there is not enough room to allow those animals to roam outside.
"The pigs can't root, the cows can't graze and the chickens can't scratch," Meillier said. "We've taken nature away from the animals. It's the bigness; it's an industry now."
But the economic reality of farming now compared to farming a century ago is clear when Roemhildt talks about the work that goes into harvesting the 15 acres of oats for the 1930s farm.
He said it would take the three men two full days of work to cut and bail the oats, then stack them into shocks. More time will be needed to move oats to storage with pitchforks and a wagon.
Roemhildt's estimated value of those oats after they're thrashed: $300.
