Manitobans set world record for wheat threshing

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This article was published 31/07/2016 (3350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Seven hundred volunteers, 5,000 hours spent refurbishing machines, 45,000 sheaves of wheat, and nearly 140 threshers dating from 1887 to 1953.

That’s what it took for staff and supporters of Harvesting Hope: A World Record to Feed the Hungry to set a new world record for most threshers operating at once in Austin on Sunday. To make the record, the threshers had to run simultaneously for at least 15 minutes.

Keeping up that pace, they would have harvested 17,000 bushels an hour — enough grain to fill 12 rail cars.

For the city-slickers out there: a thresher (also called a separator or a threshing machine) is a piece of pioneer farming equipment that was used to literally separate the wheat from the chaff when harvesting grain.

The Manitoba Agricultural Museum in Austin teamed up with the Canadian Foodgrains Bank to set the record as part of the Manitoba Threshermen’s Reunion and Stampede, with a portion of the proceeds going to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. The stampede started on July 28 and wrapped up Sunday night.

“It was phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal,” said Elliot Sims, co-chair of the event.

Sims said participants came from as far away as Newfoundland and Florida to take part, and machines were brought in all the way from Iowa and Edmonton in addition to the 25 machines housed at the Agricultural Museum.

“It was quite a sight to see,” Sims said of the event. The machines were powered by steam engines and early gas tractors, and covered four football fields worth of space.

“You really can’t, almost, hear yourself speak,” Sims said, recalling the experience. “The tractors, the hiss of the steamers… the clanking of the chains and the running of the belts — it’s all encompassing, that’s for sure.”

The Austin event was the third time the existing record has been broken in three years. In 2013, the record was set in Langenburg, Sask., with 41 machines, only to be broken and re-set at 111 machines in St. Albert, Ont., in 2015.

It’s also not the Agricultural Museum’s first world record: in 2010, the museum set the record for the world’s largest operational plow.

Austin is 135 kilometres west of Winnipeg.

aidan.geary@freepress.mb.ca