Don't Put Your Hand in That.

Well, this is exciting. My very first post on the new blog! (Forgive the simple layout, blog is under construction along with everything else on the farm) Pemberley Fields is in "Year One" of development and my first "big deal" purchase was this amazing 1903 wheat thresher.

Originally purchased to use for display and educational purposes, the thresher appears to be working just fine. Which led me to do a quick Google search on growing wheat in Florida. Evidently, yes you CAN. So, now of course, I think it would be super-farm-cool to grow a small patch of wheat and allow the thresher to do its thing, even if we just save the seed to replant the patch!

Researching just a bit on threshers, I was a tad heavy-hearted to have found that even this bit of "progress" which, in my farm-bubble-utopia, I considered super old school, caused a lot of problems. Seems the thresher,  invented by Scottish mechanical engineer Andrew Meikle (c.1784) caused the Swing Riots, an uprising of agricultural workers as they got displaced from their jobs. For thousands of years, grain was separated by hand with flails, and was very laborious and time consuming, taking about one-quarter of agricultural labor by the 18th century. Mechanization of this process took much of the drudgery out of farm labor but also took the workers out of the field.

Alas, we are the owners of said thresher....whose history we will never know, and whose future is yet uncertain.  We have a lot planned for the farm. From chickens to beef and hydroponics to honey. We are not totally sure what it will end up looking like in the end, but we do know that with all things, just like the thresher,  we will take the good and let the chaff blow away.