Agricultural museum

Transcription

Narrator Each summer at Ag Progress Days in central Pennsylvania, most visitors are focused on equipment like this and how it could affect their farming operations. When they seek shelter from the heat of the sunlit fields in the cooler space of the Pasto Agricultural Museum, they may wonder, why do we need this museum? Rita Graef We are so excited to share these artifacts with the public. We provide a context and the visitor brings his or her own story and interpretation to bring those objects alive. Narrator Objects come alive to many people from farming backgrounds as they remember how their families used certain tools. They enjoy the memories. But the museum is more than that. It's a place where we consciously connect our history with the present day and the future. Rita Graef While we're digging up some of the parts out of storage Narrator There is a danger that as time passes, the knowledge of how many of these machines work, will vanish along with the people who once used them. That's why the Pasto Museum sponsored a demonstration of a turn of the century hay press. The Cowan family has been demonstrating the 1905 Panama Hay Press to the farming community for years. Bob Cowan This is a fairly late model of horsepower baler. There's some pretty clever engineering went into the design of this as you can see as it operates. Narrator In August 2012 they gathered again, as Bob Cowan who is over 90, supervised the complicated process of how the mechanism is set up. Tim Cowan The highlight of the thing is the family. It starts out with me as a young boy twelve years old, and some of my cousins who were my cohort at that age. Charlie Cowan Comin Tim Cowan And when my grandfather selected three of us to learn this job, that gave us some status and so we loved it. Dr. Sally McMurry In the early days hay was harvested loose, and it was piled on wagons, and carried to the barn loose, and thrown into the hay mow loose. But if farmers wanted to sell hay to the city, that was a problem. It was hard to transport a wagon piled with loose hay, and that's where the press comes in. Dr. John Baylor With a need for something better, we eventually came to the hay presses that were managed or they were powered by animals. Dr. Sally McMurry When hay yields got so enormous that it was impossible to put all the loose hay into the barn, then balers were developed so that the bales could be put in the barn. And that wasn't until after World War II. Dr. Glenn Carter Folks we're gonna have a demonstration here of a 1905 baler, powered by a couple of almost oxen, 2 years old. Dr. Darwin Braund All set, Frye, Berg! Dr. Glenn Carter OK we got an operator now. Tim Cowan Each time they go around, they trigger the plunger three times. So we stuff three wads of hay into a bale each round of the team. Ah the compression of the hay behind these dogs is the spring that initiates the plunger going back up. Each time you'll hear the rhythm of the machine. If you're working all day on this thing, that rhythm just gets so engrained and steady, you move by the sounds of the machine. You can hear every click and creak, and ah and every slap and bang. As the bales come through you drop a board in and then you stuff a wire through the slots in the board when you do it often enough, it becomes like clockwork. As the bales come out, each one's tagged with its weight. And then you can tell how many tons you've made. These things would have been sold into liveries or backyard stables and ah anybody baling would probably be selling that hay. Narrator The agricultural artifacts and history in this museum serve as a reference for our faculty researchers who use it to develop present day solutions. Dr. Sjoerd Duiker The loose hay would be very bulky and would be very expensive. Narrator Penn State faculty member Dr. Sjoerd Duiker has taken a simpler version of the hay press technology to Kenya to help street youth make a living. While visiting Kenya Dr. Duiker noticed that the youth had access to a 40-acre plot of land that could grow grass or hay, and that there were many small dairy farms that surrounded the nearby towns. Dr. Sjoerd Duiker We saw there was a big opportunity for hay bales as a business for these youth. I was looking for ways to cut grass and to make bales with a very low level of investment. So the place where I went was really the museum first to take a look at the equipment that had been used here. Actually the one design that we use here is in a way very similar to that Panama Hay Press which is in the museum except it uses a plunger that is operated by human power instead of with animal power. Narrator The simplicity of this machine has allowed youth in Kenya not only to build a hay press with local materials, but also to start up a small business selling hay bales to farmers who are located close to the city, and sell milk to the masses of people who've migrated there. Dr. Sjoerd Duiker So the museum has been for us a source of potential technologies that could be used in haymaking in Kenya. Tim Cowan When I look out at the crowd, I see a lot of farmers and their families and their wives and their children. You know you see people who are working with hay, with equipment, families who are working together, and I guess the thing that is most outstanding of it, is that this represents a means of livelihood for families. And that way you work together to support one another. You see each other through the hard times and you move ahead generation to generation. Rita Graef Side by side, a 1905 hay press, revolutionary in its time, is fundamentally the same technology being used in Africa by young people to solve very different problems today. These kinds of demonstrations provide an opportunity for the museum to help our audiences connect our past and the present day.