For a long time, the most important moment of the agricultural year was the harvest and threshing of cereals (wheat, barley, oats, rye, millet, buckwheat) in summer. All the available labour was involved in mowing the ripe cereals, tying the bleaches into sheaves, building the threshing area, threshing by heating, crushing, husking or flailing, then winnowing and finally sorting the grains.
The straw was then used as bedding or thatch. The bale was used for lower quality fodder or oat bales for bedding.
The mechanisation of harvesting initially replaced men and women with much more productive machines: mowers, binders, bundlers, threshers and grain sorters from the 1880s to the 1950s. Then, these different operations were brought together to create a single machine that carried out all of them: the combine harvester.
Illustrations :
– Photographs of the harvests at the Civade in Saint Astier at the end of the 1930s, where the wheat is mowed by a mower pulled by a couple of oxen (Private collection in Hervé Mercier, Saint-Astier, 1900-1950, volume 2, La vie Astérienne, Imprimerie IOTA, 2015).
– Photograph of the threshing at La Borie in Saint Astier in the 1930s (Private collection in Hervé Mercier, Saint-Astier, 1900-1950, volume 2, La vie Astérienne, Imprimerie IOTA, 2015)
– Photograph of Louis Robinet’s locomobile operating a threshing machine during threshing at Davalant in Saint Astier in the 1930s. The driver of the locomobile and the threshing machine went around the farms to carry out the threshing. (Private collection in Hervé Mercier, Saint-Astier, 1900-1950, volume 2, La vie Astérienne, Imprimerie IOTA, 2015).
– Photograph of the threshing meal at La Laborie in the 1930s. This hard work was the occasion for festive meals for the participants in the harvest (Private collection in Hervé Mercier, Saint-Astier, 1900-1950, volume 2, La vie Astérienne, Imprimerie IOTA, 2015).