One of my favorite paintings is “The Gleaners” by the French painter Jean-Francois Millet. We have a collector plate reproduction of the painting, which depicts a trio of peasant ladies “gleaning” a field of stray grains after the harvest of the wheat or oats crop.
When I saw a printed version of the picture recently, it reminded me of the days when I was a kid and we harvested our oats before the advent of the grain combines that now do that job.
I’m 13 (or 14, or 15, or 16, it’s the same each year), it’s August, it’s hot, and Dad has the old McCormick grain binder out of storage. All moving parts are lubricated, the chains and the canvas conveyor belt are checked to be sure they’re working properly, and the cutting sickle is sharpened. The binder twine is properly threaded through the machinery to make sure the bundles will get properly bound and tied.
This is no job for a novice. Dad is a good mechanic with a keen general knowledge of how things work. When the binder is ready, he hooks it up to the little Allis C and goes rattling around the field of golden grain and tossing the bundles of oats onto the ground on top of sharp yellow stubbles.
Now it’s my job, along with my cousin John Konitzer, to pick up the bundles (or sheaves, as my grandpa called them) strewn in rows across the field, each with a bouquet of ripe grain at its head, and “shock” them. Shocking meant to stack the bundles, usually from six to eight at a time, into shocks. We stand the bundles on the stalks, the heads toward the sun, to protect the oats from weather, rodents and pheasants until threshing time.
Shocking grain is an agrarian art form, learned from my dad after a couple of years and what seemed to be thousands of shocks of practice. Here’s how you do it: Take one bundle with its head up and stand it firmly into the stubble. Hold the bundle with one hand and set a couple of bundles around it to establish a center post, then grab another five or six bundles and set them up around the center bundles.
Finally, you take one last bundle and carefully fan it out to spread over the top of all the standing bundles. This serves several purposes. It helps to bind all the sheaves together and solidify the shock, and it serves as a canopy over the entire shock, causing the rain to run off, rather than into, the shock.
Then move on down the row and do it again, and again, and again!
It’s hard, back-breaking work, but when it’s finished, you have a beautiful sight — a field populated by hundreds of golden shocks of bundles, ready for the sun to work its magic to dry and harden the grains of oats until it’s time for the threshing crews to come in to separate the grain from the straw.
Shocking the oats like that keeps the kernels from touching the ground, where, if they’d get rained on, might actually germinate and take root. The grain would be worthless. So shocking is an important part of the process of the harvesting of the crop. The job is worth doing, and it’s worth doing well! One of the many lessons my dad taught me when I was growing up.
I haven’t shocked a field of oats in nearly 60 years, but I know that if I could muster the strength and perseverance, I could probably still do it right. But I don’t see any farmers who still harvest their oats that way, and grain binders have been relegated to junk piles where they lie rusting. Combines have minimized the sweat and toil of yesteryears and replaced us shockers.
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