Lumping the grain crop - what is a bushel?

 Something entirely different today.....The summer wheat harvest is long been over in Australia. 

And now we hear on the radio each day the price of wheat - per bushel. 

What weight is a bushel I asked my husband this morning. We hear it all the time, but he didn't know either, so I went searching.... apparently A bushel (abbreviation: bsh. or bu.) is an imperial and US customary unit of volume based upon an earlier measure of dry capacity. 

But how was this determined? What volume is a bushel? I discovered that the bushel weight is different for different grains. According to Rayglen Commodities there are 48 pounds of barley in a bushel, 30lbs of sunflower, 34lbs oats, 56lbs of corn, and 60lbs of wheat (36.744 bushels to the tonne of wheat). Fascinating.... confused yet? ...... you can go to the link above to read more.

At its simplest, a bushel is a unit of measurement. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the U.S. bushel was derived from the Winchester bushel, a British measurement dating back to the 15th century. At one time, farm products could be measured by how much would fit in a bushel basket.  Read more at: Kanzas Wheat - What does a bushel mean to me? 

and this.....One bushel of wheat will yield approximately 42 pounds of white flour.....One bushel yields enough flour to make 70 one-pound loaves of white bread or 90 one-pound loaves of whole-wheat bread. 

I researched further. And I found out more of the history on the South Australian Government's history page - Transporting the Crop. .   

Traditionally, grain was packed in jute bags, mostly imported from India....These bags were handled manually until the end of World War 2..... Bags from the harvester were placed in heaps in the paddock for sewing.... The tops of the bags were sewn together by teams of bag-sewers using hemp twine. The bags were carried on the backs of "lumpers". 

I thought I had an old photo from my Dad of the wheat bags in the paddock, but all I could find was this one. 

The job of the lumper would have been strenuous and back-breaking work. Here is an interesting fact from Co-Operative Bulk Handling Limited. CBH Group on Faebook

 - On 9th December 2020, 93 years ago, Bill Cestrilli (pictured) established the CBH record for lumping and stacking the greatest number of wheat bags in one day. At Miling, (in the Western Australian wheatbelt north of Perth) Bill stacked a whopping 1,725 bags of wheat in eight hours - equating to 143 tonnes of grain. Not bad for a 74kg man! Here is a pic of Bill. 

I am not absolutely sure, but I think my uncle lumped wheat during the Depression in the wheatbelt. Here are another couple of pics I have borrowed from the net. 

Wheat bags were a very useful commodity, used for - veranda blinds, bed covers, stretcher bed bases, shoulder bags, rain covering, saddle blanket, room divider in a cottage, door mat, and many other uses you can read about here.... The mighty wheat bag

Below you can see a simple tent and bed base made from wheat bags which would have been typical in the wheatbelt during that era. We saw this display in a historical village in Wagin. My uncles slept on beds like this in a tent near the house throughout their youth. I think my Dad did too. We even had a "stretcher" like this at home. I remember sleeping on it once. 

To read more: 

Rayglen Commodities - Crop Bushel Weights 

Transporting the Crop. .  - South Australian Government history site 

The mighty wheat bag - Great Australian Story.com

Adelaide AZ - 1840s

Kanzas Wheat - What does a bushel mean to me? 

Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you and yours are well. We continue to be relatively safe from Covid here in Australia, although there are massive floods on the east coast right now, and a state of emergency has been declared in those areas. 

I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week. 
I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!
   
All Seasons
MosaicMonday at Letting Go of the Bay Leaf
Sharon's Sovenirs 
Our World Tuesday

Pictorial Tuesday 
ThroughMy Lens 
Image-in-ing
My corner of the world through my camera 
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global hosted by Randomosity. 
       and Little bird - Pienilintu
Thankful Thursday 
Der-Natur-Thursday 
The Lovin' Life Team over at: Deep Fried Fruit
 Month end link up @ Live love craft me
Hello there! I love reading your comments. If you scroll down to the bottom you can comment too! I would love to hear from you.

Western Australian wheatbelt weekend

 Hi everyone. I hope you are all doing ok. 

We have just returned from a lovely weekend with family on a grain growing property in Bruce Rock in the central Western Australian wheatbelt. 

We have a long association with the wheatbelt as both my parents were raised in the wheatbelt, and my husband has cousins in the wheatbelt. My sister's first teaching posting was to Bruce Rock and she married a farmer, and so the connection continues. I love going there, driving those wheatbelt roads through the salmon gums, walking in the paddocks, over the granite outcrops and getting back to the earth. 

When our kids were young it was a great opportunity for them to run wild with their country cousins on the farm (they always seemed to know when it was mealtime), and now these all have children of their own, and so it goes on.  

It is late spring here, but we still saw some wildflowers along the way - I always say that there is always something flowering in the Western Australian bush).

Clockwise from top left - Pop Flower (Glischrocaryon), yellow everlastings, unknown blur flower, Blue Leschenaultia (Lechenaultia biloba). one of the yellow pea flowers, wild Cauliflower (Verticordia eriocephala), one of the firebush family (Keraudrenia), and white everlastings (or possibly Waitzia suaveolens - fragrant waitzia)

We stopped at Lake Yealering for lunch as dark rain clouds were approaching across the salt lake. We have often stopped here. It is a good place to stop for lunch with picnic tables, shade, ablution block and playground, and a small shop across the road. There is a caravan park if you want to while away some time. Yealering - shire of Wickepin

Back on the road again it wasn't long before it started to rain and it was fairly obvious we weren't going to see any harvesting over the weekend. 

This is not what the farmers want this time of year as they have to halt harvest until the grain dries out. If they get too much rain the grains start to sprout and the wheat is degraded. 

However, for us visitors, we had a lovely weekend with family with plenty of get togethers, dining, walks and touring. 

You can't see it in this photo, but this is 1000 acres of solar panels just south of Merredin. They also have a wind farm. 

Located on former farming land, and developed by Risen Energy (Australia), it is the largest solar farm in Western Australia, with 360,000 panels which will generate enough power for approx 42,000 WA homes. You can read more about this project and see a video here: Merredin solar farm

A few pics from around the farm.

This is Leroy Brown and Blizzard - two bull calves - I think you can guess which is which. 

And a few wildflowers - salmon gum (Eucalyptus salmonophloia), Granite kunzia (Kunzia pulchell, Green Mulla Mulla (Ptilotus polystachyus) and two pink and grey galahs 

Too soon our weekend was over. A few more wildflowers on our way home. 

Clockwise from top left - white everlastings (or possibly Waitzia suaveolens - fragrant waitzia), one of the pink feather flowers (Verticordia), not sure of the yellow one, one of the mallees, one of the red flowering gums, nuts of the Mottlecah (Eucalyptus macrocarpa), and the native hibiscus (Alyogyne hakeifolia)

Read more about Bruce Rock here:

 Bruce Rock @ Life Images by Jill 

Shire of Bruce Rock

You might also like: 

Exploring the Western Australian wheatbelt

Do you name your farm paddocks?

Camping out in the Western Australian wheatbelt - Kwolyin free camp

Western Australian central wheatbelt

Maybe we will see harvest next year  

Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you have enjoyed this little visit to the Western Australian wheatbelt.  Stay safe everyone. 

I am saddened by the continuing reports of rising Covid cases around the world, and am so grateful to live in Australia where numbers are relatively low.  

I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week.  

I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!

   
All Seasons 
MosaicMonday at Letting Go of the Bay Leaf
Sharon's Sovenirs 

Our World Tuesday

Pictorial Tuesday 

ThroughMy Lens 

Image-in-ing
My corner of the world through my camera 
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global hosted by Randomosity.
Thankful Thursday 
Der-Natur-Thursday 

The Lovin' Life Team over at: Deep Fried Fruit
 Month end link up @ Live love craft me

Hello there! I love reading your comments. If you scroll down to the bottom you can comment too! I would love to hear from you.

Do you name your farm paddocks?

This short piece below I wrote for my writing group homework recently - "What's in a name?"

What’s in a name they ask? It’s just a name. But without names where would we be? How would we explain our location for instance? 

 

In our own homes we say….. out the front, out the back, down the side, or even down the back if you have a long back yard. 

It is common for farmers or station owners to give their yards or paddocks names developed over time so property owners know which part of the farm they are talking about.  

In USA or England you probably call a paddock a field or meadow and in USA and Canada you might know large scale cattle grazing properties as ranches, which we call stations in Australia. I found this fascinating website giving translations - Fiona Lake - rural words.

On my family’s Western Australian wheatbelt farm they have the wood yard, house yard, chook yard, shed yards, shearing shed yards, sheep yards, and cattle yards. 

There is also the home paddock, front paddock, back paddock, one tree hill, the long paddock, the quarry, and the firing range.  The image you see above here is the "front" paddock.

You might have paddocks named for the crop that is growing, its use or events that happen there – like wheat paddock, horse paddock or jumps paddock. 

From my search on the net I’ve found….just to name a few..... the top and bottom paddocks, next doors paddock, windmill paddock, the airstrip, tea tree, pine tree paddock or plantation paddock, thistle flat, river flats, gully, railway paddock, powerline paddock, Skippies, Molly’s, kitchen field, doublegee, the pipeline paddock, the sand paddock where nothing grows, a hilly paddock called Devon and a flat paddock, Somerset. There was even bathtub paddock and the tiny paddock with no gate paddock.

My family also name their blocks -  home block, Periclies, Buttons, Finks and Macarthies, named for the previous owners of farms they have purchased. 

Bruce Rock where their home block is located, was originally named Nunagin (Noonegin) but this name was easily confused with Nungarin and Narrogin, which are other towns in the wheatbelt, so it was changed to Bruce Rock, after a nearby rock said to be named after John Ruufus Bruce who cut sandalwood near there around 1879.  If you go up to the rock which is not far out of Bruce Rock you can see an old stone well.

Here is a pic of the main street of Bruce Rock early on a quiet Sunday morning.  

The list of paddock names seems to go on forever. Take a look at Stockyard on the net, then search for “who else names their paddocks” on the forum tab.  

Finally “long paddock” has several meanings. Sometimes farmers refer to being “turned out into the long paddock” when they retire. In Australia the “long paddock” also refers to droving stock routes along roads or between grants where there was no road but the feed was often better. In drought times farmers might graze their stock in the long paddock.  You can even book to do a Long Paddock Cattle Drive.

You can check out more rural words and paddock names on the links below - 

Stockyard - Who else names their paddocks?

ABC Net - Creative Paddock names buck farmer stereotype 

Fiona Lake - Australia's Outback cattle stations - rural words - for a fascinating look at rural words used in Australia and words used in America. 
 

Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you have enjoyed this little insight into rural names. If you live on a rural property, do you give your paddocks names? Perhaps you would like to tell us about them in the comments.

I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week.

I am linking up to the link-ups below. Please click on the links to see fabulous contributions from around the world - virtual touring at its best!

Mosaic Monday 
Life Thru the Lens 

Lifestyle Fifty Monday Linkup 
Our World Tuesday
Through My Lens 
Image-in-ing
Wednesday Around the World at Communal Global
Worth Casing Wednesday
Travel Photo Thursday
The Weekly Postcard

You might also like:

Exploring Western Australia's Wheatbelt 
Wheatbelt Central - Bruce Rock 
Living and Working on the Land