I was asked to preach the sermon at the church service at the Sunday morning session of the Huron Pioneer Thresher and Hobby Association Reunion (a long, convoluted story in itself) and it got me thinking about my long history as a regular attender at the show . 

My wife and I bought The Blyth Standard, the newspaper then in Blyth, in 1971. That was back in the days when there was no craft show in the arena (in fact it was before the arena was replaced with a new building because the provincial government found most arenas didn’t meet building standards after the collapse of the Listowel arena took the lives of young hockey players).

In those days there were only a few campers among those who brought equipment to the show. Camping later became so popular that the Association bought nearby farm land and paid to put in electrical wiring for hundreds of campers. 

But the one thing that remained the same from those early days is the equipment on display. The show was begun by a group of veterans who dated back to the days when threshing gangs travelled from one farm to another, with huge steam engines to power the threshing machines. Steam engines were – and are 50 year later – the stars of the show.

But by the time I grew up on a farm north of Lucknow, threshing had changed. To get our crops  harvested we exchanged work with our nearby neighbours who owned a threshing machine.

In those days, I recall, most of our crops were a few acres of wheat, oats and barley. Today the farmer who rents the land around us, along with thousands more acres, alternates corn one year with soybeans the next. Now and then they plant wheat.

There were few acres planted to corn when I was a kid because we didn’t have the equipment to handle it. There was some corn harvested to fill silos but, in our area at least, virtually no corn was harvested for grain, in those days before large, self-propelled combines.

Where the Thresher Reunion sparks memories is with the huge displays of old tractors – well, old now but many of them were state-of-the-art in the 1950s. The threshing machine that threshed our crop, was powered by a Case tractor. The neighbour across the road had a Massey-Harris 22. The neighbour to the east of us had an Allis-Chalmers and the nearby neighbour who I worked for as a teenager had two tractors – an Allis-Chalmers and a Ferguson. We had a Minneapolis-Moline. Most of these companies have disappeared.

Something that’s become big at the Thresher Reunion over the years is the collection of classic cars. Most of our neighbours had used cars. Our neighbour across the road had an old Ford, at one point, where the door was held shut by a wire attached inside the car,

On our farm, my grandmother, who stayed with us, was a practical nurse and had a relatively “new” car (meaning less than 10 years old) but we had a series of old cars which we bought cheap (all we could afford) and that sat in the orchard when we couldn’t repair them anymore. Ours was a gravel road (most were back then) and I recall travelling in a rear seat clouded with dust that entered through holes in the floor.

For someone young like my oldest granddaughter who recently got married to a beef farmer up in Grey County, it all seems so ancient. Few farmers these days are prosperous, but everyone has expectations of a better life (often supported by wives who work off the farm) than we had.

Still, it’s a shame that after so many decades of producing the food that makes urban Canadians well-fed (often to the point of being over-fed), farmers continue to struggle to live equally. Producing food is an honorable profession that deserves honorable compensation.◊

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