Types: Agricultural Equipment

The collection contains a number of items in the Grain Pickler category. These items are built to a variety of designs. Grain Picklers attract some attention from Museum visitors as the idea of pickling grain is a strange one by today’s standards. However pickled grain was not meant to be eaten directly by people but refers to the soaking of seed grain in chemicals to control plant disease.

Smut, a fungal disease,  was a common problem faced by early prairie grain producers. In barley, smut infections are more commonly known as loose smut while in wheat, smut infections are better known as bunt or stinking smut. It was found that soaking wheat and barley seed in solutions of bluestone (copper sulfate) was somewhat effective in combating smut. Then it was discovered that a solution containing formalin, a form of formaldehyde, produced better results. As the operation of soaking the seed in a chemical solution resembled making pickles to some extent, this operation became known as pickling grain.  There were a variety of ways to soak the seed. One could obtain a barrel, fill it with the solution of formalin and then immerse a bag of seed in the barrel for 10 minutes, then pull the bag out and immerse the next bag. Two barrels could also be used with the grain being loose. One barrel was filled with the treating solution and then loose seed was shoveled into the barrel. When this seed had soaked for ten minutes then the solution could be drained off into the second barrel where additional solution could be added if necessary and seed then added to this barrel. The first barrel  could then be emptied of seed which would be placed on a floor, covered by grain bags to slow down the escape of the formaldehyde and either left to dry or be loaded into the seed drill for immediate seeding. Loose grain loaded in the barrel had the advantage of letting the farmer skim off any floating materials such as awns, fragments of straw and smut balls. Manufacturers recognized opportunity and began to produce various designs of grain picklers which would treat seed with the formalin solution in a speedy fashion.

The images in this page are of some the grain picklers in the collection. With the advent of mercury and  hexachlorobenzene (HCB) fungicides in the early 1930s, the need to “pickle” seed passed. Loose smut of barley is a disease that can destroy a large proportion of a barley crop. Loose smut replaces grain heads with smut, or masses of spores which infect the open flowers of healthy plants and grow into the seed, without showing any symptoms. Seeds appear healthy and only when they reach maturity the following season is it clear that they were infected. Common bunt, also known as stinking smut and covered smut is a disease of both spring and winter wheats. It is caused by two very closely related fungi, Tilletia tritici (syn. Tilletia caries) and T. laevis (syn. T. foetida).

Plants with common bunt may be moderately stunted but infected plants cannot be easily recognized until near maturity and even then it is seldom conspicuous. After initial infection, the entire kernel is converted into a structure which produces spores. The structure is light to dark brown and is called a bunt ball. The bunt balls resemble wheat kernels but tend to be more spherical. The bunted heads are slender, bluish-green and may stay greener longer than healthy heads. The bunt balls change to a dull gray-brown at maturity, at which they become conspicuous. The fragile covering of the bunt balls are ruptured at harvest, producing clouds of spores. The spores have a fishy odor. Intact bunt balls can also be found among harvested grain. Bunt was a serious issue on the Prairies and in the US in the pioneer era. Infection levels over 20% were common in Washington state in the early 1900s, and between 25-50% of the State of  Kansas wheat crop was lost to stinking smut in 1890. Because of the dusty spore masses released during harvest, many “thresher” explosions occurred. Static electricity that developed around the combine machinery ignited the spores released by the threshing machine. In 1915, 160 such explosions were reported in Washington state. Threshermen began to ground threshing machines to prevent static electricity from developing and prevent these types of explosions. The reason smut in wheat became known as bunt was that a head of wheat when infected, had a black appearance and so appeared to be burnt. People first referred to the disease as burnt ear which was later shortened to bunt.

Cyrus McCormick built and demonstrated a mechanical reaper in 1831. Up to that time standing grain had to be cut with a scythe and then gathered by hand to be tied into sheaves and stooked for drying. As well sheaves were often carried off to a barn for drying.

After drying, threshing could take place either with a fail or a ground hog thresher. Some scythes were equipped with a lightweight carrier that caught the plants as they were cut. This had the advantage that the stalks of grain were already gathered and so were more easily tied into sheaves.  But this method was laborious and cutting the crop was the limiting factor in grain production. The most a single farmer could hope to harvest with a scythe was around 10 acres if the farmer was working by himself.   The years after 1800 saw people becoming more aware of how machines could improve their lives and make them money. Agriculture was no exception, and people were examining how agriculture could be mechanized. 

Cyrus McCormick was born in 1809 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where his father operated a large farm or plantation at the time. His father around 1801 purchased the idea for a mechanical reaper from a blacksmith named McPhetrich.  Mr. McCormick worked on this idea for the next 28 years but was never able to perfect it into a viable horse drawn machine.  Cyrus McCormick took over the project in 1830 and with the help of an enslaved African American on the McCormick plantation,  Joe Anderson, Cyrus came up with a mechanical reaper.  As the machine could not handle variable conditions well, it did not sell.

Cyrus only sold the first machine in 1840, none in 1841 and another seven in 1842.  Sales after that time slowly began to pick up.  These early machines were built by hand in the plantation workshop.  Improvements were made to the design in 1845 and in 1847 Cyrus and a brother moved to Chicago where they established a factory to build reapers. Chicago offered cheap transportation for raw materials and easy access to the farms of the US Mid-West which  Cyrus had noticed were the farms purchasing his machines. At this time the company was called the Cyrus H. McCormick and Brothers Company. It later became the McCormick  Harvesting Machine Company. In 1902, McCormick was merged into the International Harvester Company. It should be noted that other inventors were working on reapers at the time.  Robert Bell of Scotland, Obed Hussey and John Manny of the USA are a few inventors working on early reaper designs.  Bells’ work predates McCormicks and a few of Bells machines, a horse pushed machine, had been sold in the US before 1831.

 The early  reaper offered farmers the ability to harvest more than 10 aces of grain however a machine like McCormick’s first reaper still involved significant hand labour.  The grain was cut by a ground driven sickle which later become to be known as a  knife and fell on to a platform behind the knife. The farmer walked alongside the machine and raked the stalks off the platform onto the ground. Probably one attempted to rake the material off in small bunches so as to facilitate tying the stalks into sheaves.  Later the self-raking reaper was developed and from this machine was developed the grain binder which cut the grain and then bound the stalks into sheaves. In 1931, the International Harvester Company (IHC) made a number of replicas of the original 1831 McCormick reaper as promotional items. These replicas were donated to various agricultural Colleges and Universities, the University of Manitoba being one of these institutions.  In the late 1950s, the University of Manitoba donated its replica reaper to the Museum.  While it is not an exact replica of the 1831 machine it follows the general principals of the original and like the original is  entirely handmade with some parts hewn with an axe.

Reapers first seem to have appeared in Manitoba in the 1870s and are thought to be of the self-raking type. However it not beyond the realm of possibility that a machine like this was used in Manitoba.  Records kept of the time are not detailed enough that machine models were recorded.  The replica fills in a gap between the scythe and the self-raking reaper of which the Museum has several, this replica is a valuable addition to the Museum collection.