July 17, 1941 (Thursday)

EDNA BAKES ALL DAY. BOYS CUT OATS.

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Continued warm and

acts some like rain.

I did baking all day

long - baking extra getting

ready for Reunion.

Boys finished cutting oats

in big field and did

some shocking.

Henry in northern part of

County on Right of Way.

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Edna is still getting ready for the upcoming Nash family reunion and the "boys" are harvesting the oats. On this day, they finished cutting oats in the big field and start shocking.

While a love of farming (or interest in farming) may be passed down from generation to generation, being an actual farmer is not genetic. As much as I would like to be able to tell you, that like my family before me, I am a farmer; I am not. So, when Edna writes things like "shocking" the oats, I need to double check to make sure I read her handwriting correctly. Did she mean "shucking"? No! No, Jill. She did not mean "shucking." That is something I do to cobs of corn before putting it in the pot. The "boys" were "shocking" the oats.

In 1941, they were probably using a binder to cut the oats, not cutting them by hand. The binder would have been pulled by a team of horses or a tractor.

"For nearly sixty years, roughly 1880 to 1950, before the affordability and wide-spread use of combines, grain production in the American and Canadian Great Plains was dependent on harvesting with binders. Binders cut the grain stalks and then tied them into bundles with twine that farmhands later would gather into shocks to await threshing." -Agricultural History

Vol. 80, No. 1 (Winter, 2006), pp. 35-63 (29 pages)

After the cutting the field, farmers gathered the bundles of oats by hand and put them in to piles (shocks) so that the seeds faced upwards, allowing them to dry. Once dry, the seeds are separated from the stalk (threshing). From there, they are put into a grain bin and the stalks are baled as straw.

On this day in 1941 on the Johnson farm, the oats have been cut and shocking has begun. But the "boys' still have a lot of work ahead of them.