n was thinned from four to two
stalks per hill, by using a sharp stick to dig the stalks out. Then,
toward the end of June the winter wheat was harvested. Cut with a binder
and tied in bundles, it was shocked (put in stacks of ten to twelve
bundles, wigwam fashion, with a bundle on top to shed water, or stacked
on poles in a mound with the outside sloping a bit to let the rain run
off) and left to dry in the field. If threshed by hand after about a
month it had to be gathered and taken to the barn for further drying.

In the 1920s, however, only a few farmers still wielded the flail; most
threshing was done by steam and later gas-powered threshing machines
which travelled from farm to farm. Wilson McNair described these
cumbersome and sometimes dangerous machines this way:

The thresher was run and pulled by a traction engine. They moved
slowly only about 2 mi. an hour. The engine had a water tank
mounted on each side in the rear to carry water while it was moving
from one place to another.... The engines all had whistles and they
would blow them every once in a while when they were on the road so
we would know they were coming. We had to haul up some wood to fire
the engine before we threshed....

In later years we had self-packing and weighing threshers with
blowers that moved the straw further from the thresher. One time
Mr. Hornbaker threshed for us. We had a small engine and thresher
that was pulled by a team. While we were washing up for dinner some
one looked up and saw smoke, [on] the other side of the barn where
the thresher was. All hands ran up there and pulled the thresher
out of the way and saved the wheat that was threshed, but the straw
burned up. A spark from the engine had fallen into the straw.[31]

During the summer months of the cultivation process, insect control was
also a major consideration. By the late 1930s a few large farms, such as
the Harrisons, could hire an airplane to dust their crops, but modest
farms of necessity relied on hand labor for this, as most other chores.
"As ... new varieties of clover, alfalfa, and other plants came to be
used, seems like the insects came along with them," lamented one
farmer.[32] The Japanese beetle, introduced into America in the 1920s,
wrecked particular havoc with the crucial corn crop. "The Japanese
beetle was just awful," recalled Ray Harrison, "it would eat the tassel
up whi