Livestock farmers need to feed and provide bedding for their animals. They either grow hay and straw themselves, or purchase it from others.
To make hay, farmers grow certain grasses, which they then cut and cure. Several nutritional grasses and legumes can be used for hay, including alfalfa, clover, and timothy. Farmers cut and dry the grasses and then use the hay as animal fodder. Hay-making requires an understanding of when to cut each particular type of grass. Farmers need several consecutive days of fair weather for the hay to dry. Hay-making is both a science and an art.
To make straw, farmers grow wheat and other grasses, which they then cut and dry to form hollow stalks of grain. Straw is mainly used for bedding, mulch, and feed, although it has less nutritional value than hay. In the 19th century, farmers knocked grass heads off the stalks over a threshing floor. They then raked up the straw and gathered the wheat separately for animal feed or to make flour.
In the early 20th century, threshing wheat brought neighboring farmers together as a communal labor pool. Before farmers had modern methods to process wheat and other grasses, friends and neighbors volunteered to help each other. During the threshing season, farmers moved from field to field with a noisy steam engine that rattled and shook as it powered the threshing machine.
In Their Own Words
Hear stories about Cuyahoga Valley life below.
Since the mid-19th century, Dorcas Snow's family produced straw and hay on their farm in Brecksville. In the following passage, from her memoir Dear Brecksville, Dorcas describes neighbors helping her father thresh wheat.
"At threshing time, Father never had any trouble getting enough help as Mother had a dinner for the men that was fit for a king, all the way from fried chicken to apple pie. I was always worried for fear there would not be any left but Mother assured me that she had some extra saved for the helpers." Dorcas Snow, Brecksville, 1976
Wheat Threshing
A recollection of wheat threshing along the valley.
The threshing of the wheat that occurred each summer, or fall I guess it would be, farmers came from all around the valley and up toward Bath and wherever. And they would trade off every time threshing needed to be done. They would help each other.
In the early 20th century, farmers used a steam engine to power their threshing machine.
Courtesy/Bath Township Historical Society
Threshing by Steam Engine
Pat Morse, who grew up near Hale Farm, describes community wheat threshing in the 1940s.
That might have been Hale Run Creek that went right through the corner of our property, and they would always stop with this huge steam engine with a threshing machine, to fill up with water, that had great big wide belts and it was really large. But it was really a big engine, and you would – well, like you would with steam trains, you would have all the steam and looked like smoke, whatever it was, and it was very noisy and we just thought it was pretty cool. ~laughs~
Curing Hay
Ernest Ogrinc, a Valley View farmer, describes the modern process of curing hay.
Today’s process is a combination called a [indistinguishable] disk bind or maybe a new idea had there [mumbling] cut conditioner. What you do is you cut it and crush it to some extent to open up the stems to allow it to cure better, to be able to dry. And you don’t really dry hay, you cure. There’s a difference. And we’ll come in with a tedder, and we’ll ted the hay up to fluff it, to help the air and sun get through. Mother Nature was drying, or curing hay—I want to use the word “curing”—is amazing that this stuff is so wet, so thick when you cut it, and yet it cures up and dries the moisture out of it so quick. It’s unbelievable. And then we come by. We have to rake it into what’s called a “windrow” and generally I don’t like to windrow unless I don’t got a bailer, ‘cause it’s—when—if you don’t have to—if you have to let it go overnight ‘cause you didn’t get it bailed up, now you got moisture underneath so you gotta flip it or fluff it or somethin’, so the least you have to handle that hay, the better off you are.
