Читать книгу Footsteps in the Furrow - Andrew Arbuckle - Страница 23

In the early days of the last century, playing the fiddle brought no music to the fields. However, if it had been played correctly, then a good, even crop of grain would result, the fiddle in this case being a stringed bow that turned a small plate in front of a hopper carried by the sower. The principle was simple: seeds falling onto the spinning disc were thrown out onto the soil, hopefully in an even pattern.

The fiddle took over from the method of sowing grain adopted by man since biblical times. A rhythmical swing of alternating hands full of grain as the sower walked steadily up and down the field had scattered the seed for thousands of years. In fact, it was said that ploughmen could be recognised when they went to town as their hands swung from side to side rather than back and forward, but I am sure there were other, more telltale features that revealed the rural dweller.

Later in the century machinery came into its own, with seed barrows pulled first by horses and then with the removal of the shafts and the insertion of a tractor linkage point. Nowadays the seeder combines with various cultivation equipment to create what is unimaginatively if accurately described as a ‘one-pass’ seeder.

After seeding, the fields had to be cleared of any stones that might blunt a scythe blade or bend a finger in the cutting bar of the binder. This stone collecting was generally considered women’s work and small gangs of them would be seen gathering together piles of stones that would later be loaded onto carts heading for a dump.

Stone collecting was always the most dispiriting of jobs. Every year there would be another crop to collect and on Logie Farm we would regularly lift 200 tons, or 180 tonnes, of stones off 150 acres every year. The arrival of more and more stones was not, as was often suggested, because they grew, but because of frost heaving them upwards, and the point of a plough or cultivator then lifting them to the surface. On my stone collecting stints, the instruction from the old grieve was not to pick up any stone smaller than my head. That was all right, but I don’t think the grieve realised that picking stones was a head-shrinking exercise! Nowadays, there is virtually no stone collection in cereal fields. Cultivators tend not to prise them out of the soil, and where they are a problem heavy rollers are used to thump them beyond the range of potential damage.

One other job relating to cereal growing, which thankfully slipped off the agenda before my time, was the requirement to hand-hoe weeds from the growing crop. This required some nifty work with long-handled hoes which was essential before selective weedkillers were available. If a crop of cereals was badly infected by weeds, drastic action was sometimes taken with a spray of sulphuric acid. Because many of the weeds were broadleaved, they would generally soak up far more of this killer chemical while the young cereal plant shoots would avoid the worst of the treatment.

Such was the significance of the arrival of selective weedkillers that the local paper reported in 1949 that Mr Adamson of Friarton Farm, Newport-on-Tay had that year sprayed half his cereal acreage with MCPA, one of the first generation of herbicides.