U.S. farms are highly mechanized, one of the reasons a comparatively small number of people can produce a torrent of food, feed and fiber. Harvest Public Media went to western Illinois for a contest to harvest corn the old-fashioned way, by hand. The winner, Dick Humes, picked 322 pounds of corn by hand in 20 minutes – slicing open the husk with a metal hook strapped to his right hand, snapping the ear from the stalk with his left hand and tossing it into a wagon trailing alongside him. “It’s an art. A dying art,” he said.
Another of the competitors, Don McKinley, picked corn by hand as a child along with the rest of the family on a farm in southwestern Iowa. It was grueling all-day work to average 4,500 pounds of corn a day for each of them. Mechanical pickers are much faster, he told the public broadcaster.
The national corn husking contest, a callback to popular contests during the hard times of the 1930s, is scheduled for Oct 19 at Amana, Iowa. Details are available here.