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For a change of pace, I thought I would do an article on a friend of mine and our family, who lived down the road from my grandparents in Jeanette’s Creek.
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By: Kim Cooper
Some of you may know the name Bert Rammelaere. He is a friend of mine and our family who lived down the road from my grandparents in Jeanette’s Creek, and who has farmed and been involved in agriculture in Chatham-Kent for many decades.
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Here is his story of what farm life was like early in his life in his own words:
In the spring of 1939, my parents Richard and Alida, and I arrived in Canada from the Netherlands. We went to work for a farmer in Tilbury East. They blocked sugar beets and did general farm labour. My dad borrowed money from a friend and bought a 75-acre farm in Tilbury East in 1939.
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At that time, there was hydro only on the main roads. We never got hydro on our rural road until 1946. All the farmers in the neighbourhood had horses and tractors. They all had cattle, hogs, chickens and horses. Horses mostly to do the farm work, plus the tractor if they had one.
Most farmers in the area grew corn, oats, wheat, some barley and a field of hay that they cut and put in the barn for feed for the winter. They all had pasture for the cattle in the summer.
Our family did not get a tractor until 1942. There were very few tractors available through the war (1939-1945) and most of the tractors around the area had steel wheels.
Planting was done with horses because the planters/drills were not set up for tractors. There had to be someone on the planter/drill to put it in and out of gear at the ends of the row.
A good crop of wheat would yield 30 to 40 bushels per acre, oats 60 bushels per acre, corn 80 bushels per acre. There was very little fertilizer used. Fertilizer was only used for sugar beets and tomatoes, but nothing else at that time.
In the late 1940s, farmers started to put nitrogen fertilizer on the wheat fields and that made quite a difference. Yields would be 50 to 60 bushels per acre of wheat then and the same with oat yields.
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Corn yields would be 110 bushels per acre, all husked by hand. Some farmers had mechanical corn pickers but mostly it was husked by hand and put in the corn crib to dry. There was no shelled corn yet.
There was no hybrid seed corn back then — it was mostly field corn. Some companies had seed corn, but it was just corn they grew and picked the nice ears, treated it a little bit with an insecticide and then sold it as seed corn.
Farmers planted 12,000 to 16,000 corn plants per acre, compared to around 30,000 plants per acre today. If you planted more, the ears would be small. Our family had a corn picker in the late 1940s.
At first, most corn went into the corn cribs as there were very few shellers. Shellers were located at the grain elevator in Tilbury (and in most towns) and the corn went there in the spring after it dried all winter in the corn cribs.
Corn stalks were left in the field over the winter and in the spring they were cut down by hand and burned. Some larger farms had a two-row cutting machine shaped like a V with a steel blade on each side for the corn stalks.
When the wheat was ripe, it was harvested by a grain binder and put into bundles. Bundles were dropped off in piles and put in shocks — nine bundles to a shock.
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When that was done, one farmer in the neighbourhood had a threshing machine — threshing, or thrashing is the process of loosening the edible part of grain or other crop from the straw to which it is attached.
Eight to 10 farmers in the neighbourhood worked to thresh all the fields. It was set up close to the barn near the straw stack. Once wheat was done, they would do the same with oats.
In the winter, the horses and cows would be in the straw stack during the day and at night back in the barn.
Kim Cooper was involved in the agribusiness sector for over 45 years. He can be reached at kim.e.cooper@gmail.com.
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