Mrs Pubchat & I had a very enjoyable visit yesterday to the Weeting Steam Rally – with steam and vintage displays covering a lot of areas from static machinery to farm equipment and traction engines. I was for a long while transfixed watching the steam powered threshing and bailing display, which I have put a short video for below.
But it had me wondering, what is “threshing”?
Threshing is defined as “the agricultural process of separating the edible grain (such as wheat, rice, or barley) from the straw and husks that surround it.” It is the crucial step that in the harvesting process that happens after the actual harvesting but before winnowing which is where they blow away the light debris.
Originally the job of threshing required intense manual labour, but during the industrial revolution, as seen in the video below it evolved and mechanical threshing machines that use a spinning spiked cylinder to strip the grain away from the stalks were developed to speed up the process and reduce the labour involved.
Today, it has evolved further and commercial farms use a single machine called a combine harvester. It is named a “combine” precisely because it combines three separate jobs into one continuous operation: harvesting (reaping) the crop, threshing it inside the machine, and winnowing it to clean the grain.
