Quote:
Originally Posted by Skoshi Tiger
I can only talk from an Australian Point of View, but there were a range of horse drawn mechanical harvester available from the turn of the centrury. As a lad in Western Australia, it seemed like every farm had it's mechanical graveyard with at least one old horse drawn Sunshine harvester.
Now I'm not sure how that translates to 1940's England with the smaller acreages, traditional farming practices and a larger labour force (In Australia at the time (as now), if you were not an efficient farmer your not a farmer!), And I have no idea how common it would be in England at the time.
This style of equipment produces a more regular patterns after the harvesting process.
It's amazing where these discussions will lead.  |
Yeah, it's nice to ramble a bit sometimes.
I don't know about the war, I don't remember it
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I was born in 1954 and lived in the country as a child. By the time I was taking notice (probably 1957 at the earliest) it was all combine harvesters, tractors, and mechanical balers. There was ploughing using horses, as a sport, but the real thing was always done using tractors by that time (a team of horses could pull one plough, a tractor could pull four at once). There is a tractor in the Airfix kit of the Stirling that looks a lot like the farm tractors in my day, as the current tractors do (except front wheels seem bigger now), I presume the engine capacities and power have increased.
Bales in those days were rectangular, now they're round, that's quite a recent change, in the 1980s or 1990s in Britain?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baler
Wikipedia says 1937 for small "square" bales, so they may have begun to be used in the war, or maybe they were available in the USA only?