Binder and Stooks long ago

As we approached March 2005 we had the AGM of the NFU of Scotland in St Andrews. So also March is the month for mad March hares. And we have started one now which is in full chase, the environmental hounds unleashed and baying in full cry. We can no longer hunt with dogs in Scotland, but farming will take the place of the fox, so tallyho, boys, press on, etc.. And SNH will be in at the kill, with RSPB and RSPCA and all the other Greenies not far behind. Blood lust is a great thing, and has not yet been abolished.
In the paper of Feb. 26 I read many amazing things on farming and of our politicians. Top of the comics list without question, though the list gets ever longer, was the new Grant of £40 per hectare for cutting our oats, wild or otherwise, with a binder, and for stooking the sheaves another £150 per hectare, without it being too clear if the £40 for cutting is included in the £150 for stooking, or is in addition. Needs clarification, but I would assume that it is so included. Mind you, it took me a week to get that far in the newspaper of my choice in the local library, so it was fresh news to me as I wrote this. It appeared underneath a paragraph stating “new land management contract scheme to help the environment and allow farmers to improve their businesses.” Food for thought there, if the old-fashioned word “food” is still allowed.
So I turned my tired mind back a long ways, half a century, which I think makes me half a Centurion !!, though not the Roman one !! I was brought up with binder and stook, so much so that I remember my father Tom Pottinger in Whitehall Farm in Stronsay in Orkney buying, in 1938, his very first Massey-Harris Pacemaker petrol/paraffin tractor and his very first same make power-drive binder. “Whit progress, boy! But will id work? ” No more stuck behind sweating horses with a ground-drive binder skidding its big driving wheel through the mud of a late hearst. You could now sit on your “antecedent” and let the tractor turn the binder over to get rid of the blocked straw-stalks, a frequent enough occurrence.
Before that a reaper had to try to cut the lying crop which the ground drive binder could not handle, often enough flattened and growing green in advance of next Spring. Sometimes it actually was still there next Spring, still green if the wild-geese and the seagulls had left it, a rare enough concession.
Told a friend of mine of this new Grant. Needless his mind was in the past, as we both were to some extent. “Will there be a Grant to buy a binder, div ye think? An’ maybe a New Breeding Grant to acquire the Clydesdale horses to pull it.” Sweet thoughts. Memories flooded back as we two sat under the dry stane dyke newsan. A memory of my father, still in Stronsay then, meeting the Postman every morning at the WhiteSlaps next the village, Postie Chunno from the Sooth end of Stronsay, my father from the Nort-end. All summer the Bletchen field grew beside them, a wonderful crop of bere, the Orkneymans’ answer to barley.
Shot into ear early, level as a pond, heavy as a fog. And then one night of wind and rain, and in the morning the field flattened every whichaway, lying in all directions.
That morning Chunno met my father as usual at the Slaps, greeted him with the words “Tom, Tom boy, whit a mess thee field is in the day!” “ Yass, Chunno” my father said, “but thee never said a d*** word aboot how good a crop it wis when id wis still standing.” Such is life.
That field I remember as a boy, even the reaper was unable to handle the worst bits, the very worst being cut out with the scythe and hand tied sheaves before even trying the reaper, a trauchly job indeed. No sheaf like unto another, and the devil to build into a corn sack that looked other than a grossly enlarged windlin of straw.
So much more to it than that. Where are the old hands wise in the ways of binders, of just what angle to strive for to cut one-way only in a flattened crop, lying just off the horn of the binder so it straightened as it came across the platform? Where are the men who could adjust the four binder levers continuously, enough to make just the right sheaf, the binder-twine in just the right place, not too near the top, not too near the bottom, constant shifting as the crop varied in length or angled direction as it came up the elevator canvas sheets? Where the men, and women, who could still place a stook just North and South, to catch an equal amount of sun on either side during the day, if the sun shone at all, a stook to stand the winds and gales of the North as we so often had? Where the harvest hands who could make a band to bind a loose sheaf with a handful of straw and a twist of the wrist ? Indeed where are the men at all? Long gone in most all cases, those few left with us well past working other than as consultants!! The comic list is of course endless, but stooking is enough for one day.
Of late years I have truly wondered if we are all slowly going mad. Our farming leaders accept Government edicts all too easily without telling them it is nuts, or standing firm against some screwball idea from Civil servants whose little knowledge of the Countryside and whose farming knowledge was gained from picture book readers at Nursery school, and has not progressed at all. This is a cow. This a calf. This is a sheep. This a lamb. This is a hen. This is a cat. This is a stook. This is a binder. This is a stook. This is a farmer.
As my American retired engineer friend said to me at the Black Isle Show in 1999, in a difficult to understand accent, “ It’s all (h)efferdust.” At least that is what my ear heard. Took me quite a few questions to understand his drift, but eventually made out what he was saying. “ Dessicated Bullshit ”.