Before there was Amazon. Before there was the internet, people made yarn, clothing, iron tools, and other crafts that are no longer part of everyday life. A biannual show in central Illinois where farmers demonstrate skills that were commonly used at the turn of the twentieth century.

This video will show how corn was harvested, stored, and prepared as food for people in the middle of the twentieth century. Nearly all corn is harvested with larger, modern machines. Nearly all corn is used for livestock feed or ethanol fuel. A significant amount of corn is also ground into c...

One way corn was harvested in the early twentieth century was cutting the entire plant and bundling it. These bundles are often placed in shocks which are symbolic of fall harvest. In this video the bundles are brought in from the field to have the ears separated from the fodder. The ears of c...

The most common way of harvesting corn was to remove the ear from the stalk leaving the stalk in the field. This was done by hand until machines were developed. Until then; the amount of corn planted was dependent upon the amount of labor available to harvest. The ears are then moved to storag...

Once the corn has dried sufficiently to be stored as grain, or sold, or fed to livestock; it is shelled. These machines take grain from storage in cribs and separate the grain from the cob and husks.

The combined harvester cuts the plant and separates the grain from the plant material in one operation. Some combines are pulled by tractors and some are autonomous self propelled machines. They are much faster and more efficient than previous forms of harvest, but the farmer must be aware of t...

This field of approximately 125 acres of irrigated corn yielding in excess of 10,000 pounds of grain per acre is harvested in less than a day using modern machines. Each wagon requires a 200 horsepower tractor and is capable of holding 25 tons of grain. Enough grain to fill an 18 wheeler.