Husking like it’s 1899
Near Roseville in west-central Illinois, Abby Wendle joined the Illinois State Corn Husking Contest, an event that replicates the fall harvest from the era before agricultural mechanization. "Whole families would head out at dawn to walk the rows with their horse-drawn wagons. They'd try to pick 50 bushels, 2,800 pounds of corn, before lunch and another 50 bushels in the afternoon, often harvesting until dark. Farm kids regularly missed weeks, even months, of school to help," writes Wendle, a reporter with Harvest Public Media.
Picking corn by hand, “a dying art”
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.