Talkin to my cuz the other day and he reminded me of one of our many farming adventures when we was young lads. I can't remember if it was called chaukin, shockin or just what the name of it was but any way one of our uncles had hired us to help harvest a field of millet, wheat, sorghum, corn, and no telling what all was in it. He had planted a mixture of feed seeds in a 10 acre plot and when time to harvest he used a sickle mower and cut it down and cuz and I would gather a bunch of it up and tie it off into a bundle. Then we would lean several bundles up to each other. When we were done it looked something like a bunch of teepee's across the little field. After it had dried (cured) my uncle came back and loaded it up in his pickup and hauled it to his barn. According to my cuz our uncle fed his family milk cow and her offspring off these bundles all winter long. So I was just curious. Do any of you old timers remember doing this when you were younger or do you know of anybody doing it now? It seems like it would still work today for the homesteader who wants to save on feed.
It's called "shocking" and here's a link showing a picture of it done: http://www.kountrylife.com/content/vin83.htm
We tried "shocking" whole corn stalks a few years back and discovered that the mice had a gourmet feast on the cobs before we used all of it.
True, if the wheat or corn is left in the shock to long, the grain will feed herds of mice and rats. The Amish north of here still cut wheat with a grain binder which ties it in sheaves and the opperater drops the sheaves in rows on the ground. It is then stood up in shocks to dry until they haul it in and run it through a threshing machine that seperates the wheat from the straw. Corn is done the same way, only using a corn binder then shocking it to dry out. Later it is hauled in on horse drawn wagons and run through a corn shredder which shucks the ears from the fodder and conveys them into a wagon. The fodder is shreddes into small pieces and blown into the haymow of the barn for livestock feed. I never seen anyone plant a group of various plants in the same plot for harvest. They quit bundling the grain into sheaves by hand over 100 years ago. It looks like Unk gave you boys a trip to the past.
Hey Uncle Will our Unk was good to bring the past back to us. One time he fixed up this old hay rake and attached to the back of a flat bed trailer. The rake would pick up the hay and scoot it back up toward the trailer and dump over the top onto the trailer. When he showed us what we were going to be doing we thought this was going to be a peice of cake compared to hauling square hay bales. Unk hopped onto the tractor and stuck it in gear, took off, and the hay started coming over the top so fast that we couldn't rake the hay toward the front of the trailor fast enough to keep up. He had to stick the tractor in the lowest gear for us to keep up. Then on top of that we wouldn't go very far at all before we had a full load that we would have to go dump. After one full day of hauling loose hay off of a 20 acre field and only collecting about 1/3 of it my uncle decided to bale the rest of it. Boy was we glad to see square bales once again!
I still think that "bound" feed makes for better feed than bales. However it is much more labor intensive. Having said that I did call a friend this spring to see if he knew where I might be able to buy an old binder. He knew of one that is shedded and will eventually contact the owner to see if he will sell it. I'm not sure whether it is a grain binder or a corn binder. Until my dad had a heart attack and sold off our cattle we always used bound cane feed. I've shocked a many an acre for ourselves and others. I'll also mention that sheaves of green cane feed are heavy toward the end of the day. I read some old microfilmed newspapers last year and there was an article telling that my dad's uncle had purchased a new McCormick binder. The hardware store that sold it was inviting everyone out to watch it in action in hopes that others would make purchases also. This was a horse drawn binder, and the one we used was PTO driven. I assume that it was perhaps the first in the area at the time. Sheaves of cane or corn should really sell well for fall decorations.
