In my grandfather's time all the corn was picked by hand. A horse would pull the wagon through the field and the farmer would pick the ear of corn and then cut the husk away from the ear with a knife that was attached to his wrist. The wagon had a bang board against which the ears were thrown so as to catch the ear if your throw was off. It was like a backboard on a basketball hoop. They would get up early in the morning and spend long hours harvesting the corn. I remember how big and strong my grandfather's hands were. I am sure it was the result of many hours of picking corn by hand.

Hand picking was later replaced with the corn picker. The earlier models were mounted on the tractor and usually had a 2 row picker that gathered the corn which was transported on rollers up along the side of the tractor into a chute that dispensed the corn into a wagon behind the tractor. These machines were human limb choppers. Many farmers lost their arms or hands in those rollers that ran alongside the tractor. My Uncle Bill Von Behren lost 2 fingers in one of those pickers.

With the advent of the modern combine, farmers can cut, shell, and store the corn in a hopper on the combine all in one operation. When the hopper is full, a grain truck pulls up next to the combine and the hopper of grain is emptied into the truck to be hauled to the elevator or to the farmers own dryer where the corn is to dried.

These old pickers left a lot of corn on the ground. I remember going out into the fields when I was kid to gather the corn left on the ground. We would put the corn in a gunny sack and haul it home where we would feed the corn into a hand operated corn sheller that would shell the corn into feed for the chickens.

Corn shelling time was a fun time around the farm. When I was a kid, Folkert Harms would bring in his old 1926 Diamond Reo cornsheller. This machine looked like a Rube Goldberg contraption with belts and pulleys, chutes and levers everywhere. Neighbors would show up with their corn shovels and get in the crib and shovel the corn down into a conveyor placed outside at the bottom of the corn crib. The conveyor would carry the corn to the sheller which would be standing there huffing and shaking and spitting out the bright yellow corn into a grain truck. The kids would be given the job of trying to kill the rats that came scurrying out of the crib when the corn started moving. We would take a club and try to kill the little beasts before they got away. I remember one time when Austin Lindley had a rat climb up his pants while shoveling corn and had to have his pants cut off to get rid of the rodent.

Farmers today try to harvest corn when it is dry so that they don't have to pay so much for drying at the elevator. Farmers are docked a certain amount for the corn they bring in based on the percentage of moisture in the corn. The early corn usually checks in more moist than late corn because the corn will dry the longer it stays in the field. Farmers always wait until late morning before they combine the corn so as to have a lower moisture content in the corn. The morning dew makes the corn more moist.

Today's farmer is much more productive and can farm probably 5 times as much acreage in the same amount of time that it took him years ago. Unfortunately, the farmers still need government subsidies to make a reasonable profit. The answer to this is being debated and requires another editorial. Suffice to say that today's farmer is more productive but I feel that the farmers years ago had more fun even if they did have to work harder.