ROULEAU, Sask. – There’s a whole lot of old junk lying around on a stretch of good farmland just outside the small town of Rouleau.
And that’s just how the vintage machinery fans like it.
Swarms of prairie residents descended on the town to enjoy the Rouleau Threshing Bee, a yearly event that highlights and keeps alive machinery that most farmers trashed decades ago.
“You won’t see this stuff anywhere else,” said bee organizer and farm implement preservationist Clarence Taylor as he took a visitor for a walk along a long line of hand-made discers. Cutting off from the discer line at right angles was a row of horse-drawn plows with scattered bands of admirers wondering at the labor that would have been involved in turning even one acre.
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“It’s just impossible,” said Taylor as he looked at the primitive but innovative implements. “I can’t imagine how the work got done.”
But just over his left shoulder a group of men and women are laying down a line of swathed wheat. In a few minutes Taylor and the group will stook wheat while a loader and hay cart follow behind, recreating labor-intensive harvests at the turn of the century.
Once the cart is filled, the workers move to a yard in front of a grandstand. There they set up two old threshing machines, one from 1916, and begin separating the wheat.
On the field, two preserved tractors supplying the horsepower that runs the threshers.
In the cart two people – one of them an 81-year-old woman – pitchfork wheat sheaves onto a belt that feeds the voracious machines. They do not tire, even after an hour.
The threshing display is a favorite with many, but quieter attractions earn the interest of others.
The “Zig-Zag” gravity-powered grain cleaner fascinates a pair of visiting farmers as wheat polluted with mustard passes through a series of screens. The grain that comes out at the bottom is close to mustard-free.
A few feet away, two men discuss their joint vice – keeping alive old stationary engines.
“I was born with a piece of iron in my hand and never dropped it. I’ve always liked playing with old junk,” said Morley Gooding of Estlin, Sask.
So does Doug Laing of Dilke, who with Gooding is poring over the interior of one of the engines.
“They really had lots of savvy,” said Laing. “Today, the people that are making the engines, they’re just copying what these engines are all about. The engines built today won’t be around in 100 years, like these here are.”
