Farmer remembers harvests from 60 years ago

A Saskatchewan farmer remembers how different harvest season used to be.

Bill Warrington, 78, owns a farm in the RM of Antelope Park, northwest of Kindersley.

He has been at the job full-time since 1959. He also worked on his family farm before that.

He said one of the biggest differences in harvesting is the size of combines.

“My dad bought a new combine in 1953. It had a 14-foot header … Now, you can buy a combine with a 45-foot header, so you can imagine the amount of people that would replace,” he told 650 CKOM.

“The equipment just got so much bigger that it’s unreal.”

His dad would tell him stories of what the farm was like in the 1930s. Warrington said there’s a massive difference between then and now.

“They used the binder and the sheafs … It took literally hundreds of guys to do all that work. You took the sheafs off the field, (manually) piled all the straw up, and if it was just a nuisance, you probably ended up burning it,” Warrington said.

He speculated on how his grandson might end up farming.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if he came out to the field with a motorhome, sat down at a computer, programmed in the machine and then just sat there and watched it go,” he said.

However, Warrington does see some problems with the evolution of farming tech.

“If they break down or quit on you, you’ve got to run to town to get someone to help you fix them,” he said.

Warrington also thinks he’d be too bored with a self-driving combine.

With how much he has seen the world change, it makes sense to him that agriculture has come a long way as well. He said something as simple as a phone call would have been mind-blowing back in the 1950s.

“Can you imagine … when I was 14 years old, if I could have sat on this tractor and talked to a guy in Saskatoon — come on,” he said. “It’s a whole different world … It’s changing so fast.”