Officialdom was in full sway even long ago
Much used in farming in former days, the bushel measure was a round wooden cylinder, flat bottomed, with a roller to go with it to level off the grain when filled. It was stamped with a certifying mark both on the outside and on the inside on each of the three bottom boards.
Such meticulous stamping made sure that even the floor could not be cheated by inserting a thicker board – even that would have had but little effect on the overall measure. Still, officialdom was in full sway even long ago.
Slightly overfill the bushel with a grain scoop or shovel but not from too great a height, knee-high usually. Give the bushel a knock with the roller to settle the grain. Take the roller right across the rim from side to side to take off any surplus. Give it another knock to settle the grain just a little below the rim so no spilling when lifted to fill a sack.
Full measure was just that, it had a very real meaning and the phrase really began with that measuring of grain to sell. Many a crofter stood in the loft and watched most carefully as our father filled for him his few bushels. The farm men as well, buying a little oats for their own household hens.
A strong hessian grain sack held four bushels, 1½ cwts of standard weight of oats, 2 cwts of barley or bere, 2¼ cwts of wheat which we did not grow much in the north but it was done. Perhaps we had better and sunnier summers then.
Standard grain weight was 42 lb a bushel for oats, 56 lb for barley, 60 lb for wheat. These weights were for well-filled grain from a good harvest, but not that many crops came anywhere near that standard by a long mile. Sowing of grain was measured even into my own day by so many bushels an acre, six bushels comes to my mind for lea oats but I have heard of as many as eight. For clean land after a turnip crop around four bushels an acre was usual, maybe a bit over.
That seed grain was sown by the old 18-foot-wide horse-drawn broadcaster, but many a crofter used the sacking tray strapped over his shoulders and an easy left right, left right of his full fists and an easy step each time, for every throw scattered the grain as well as any machine. His wife stood the while at the end rig to fill his tray with a measure from the seed sacks.
THE bushel was such a widely used measure over the whole world, particularly during the time of the pioneer settlers, many from Scotland, in foreign lands such as Canada and the USA, to mention two of many.
From Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, in a letter of October 4, 1908, Oliver Drever, a prairie settler originally from the Bay Farm in Stronsay, wrote home:
“I saw a man close by here had a piece of wheat just a mass of wild oats when it came up. He let it grow on till first of June and then he ploughed it down and sowed it to barley – that’s just bere same as you sow at home – and he told me he had close on 70 bushels to the acre.
“One man here had seed from Scotland last spring and sowed it on breaking and thrashed 115 bushel to the acre, that’s about the best I’ve heard of. Oats in general goes anywhere from 40 to 80 bushels.
“We thrashed 40 acres one night in three-and-a-half hours and had 2400 bushels. The separators are the ones to shove it through. If the stuff is good and dry she will take it as hard as four men will pitch it on to her.
“Nothing ever seems to affect them as long as it goes in end first. One night we were thrashing some stacks we put up before we start to thrash and the foreman took off the governor belts and you may be sure she did go. She (the separator) put two stacks, about the same size as we used to make them, in an hour and a few minutes but the work is only fair at that rate.”
Back in my grandfather’s wages book at the Bu of Rousam, his farm foreman, Thomas Gorn, got one bushel oats in December 1899 and two bushels in March 1900.
This would have been oats for Gorn’s few hens, not for selling eggs but enough to keep his household going. A fresh new-laid egg every morning still has attraction!