Onbei
a farm
-And o
h&z&r l
Joyce B
How many pecks are there in a
bushel?
That query came up at the
breakfast table one morning last
week. Seems one of his favorite
neighborhood farmers had men
uoned to the teen-ager how many
pecks of wheat seed he had
planted this fall.
How many pecks in a bushel?
Two, I quickly guessed. No, four.
Eight? Both the farmer and I
allowed it had been a long time
since we’d studied those measure
ments in school, and practically
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never have occasion to need to
know. And the teen-ager was cer
tain he had never had to learn that
particular dry measure unit
A brand spanking new seed
corn “crop notes” pocket
notebook just happened to be bur
ied nearby in the current stack of
mail. Those little gems are always
chocked full of such handy
information.
Sure enough, between the pages
of maturity, disease and pest rat
ings, planting rate recommenda
tions, silage tonnage estimate
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1952 LANDIS VALLEY RD. - 1/2 MILE EAST
OF EDEN, JUST OFF ROUTE 23. THE NEW
HOLLAND PIKE. LANCASTER. PA. 17601
charts and yield calculations, was
a page titled Farm Math. It fea
tured metric conversions,
diameter/circumference equa
tions, how to’s on measuring area
and volume for circles, rectangles,
triangles, cubes, cones - even pyr
amid shapes - for storages or piles
of harvested grains.
Not a mention of a peck. On a
hunch, I dug into an accumulation
of advertising notepads. Out came
a piece of farm history, a 1969
seed com pocket notebook, com
plete with jotted notes on bales of
hay and straw harvested that sea*'
son. But not a single dry measure
chart was among the yield charts,
steps to better silage, list of plant
food removals by various crops
and com yields by state in 1967.
Here was living proof of how
limes change, including our
methods of measuring the impor
tant things in our business and
lifestyles.
Recently, I condensed the
accounting data on a computer
disk, for more efficient numbers
crunching of the year-to-date’s
worth of stored information. At
the start, only some 27,000 bytes
of space remained on my disk, or
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LANDIS VALLEY RD
A.A.R.'
less than a tenth of the storage
capacity.
Remember when a "byte” was
something you took out of an
apple, and had nothing to do with
recordkeeping? And RAM was a
male sheep or something one ve
hicle might accidentally do to
another, not a measurement of
computer memory.
Ignoring the obvious dictionary
and encyclopedia, I went in search
for the elusive peck measurement
in my small collection of farm
almanacs. One chart in a recent
one did have dry measure weight -
in metric equivalents. But no
pecks per bushel.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac of
1983 included a fascinating run
down on the origin of old mea
sures. A foot, for instance, was the
length of Charlemagne’s foot, the
equivalent in the year 1305 of 36
barleycorns laid end to end. (How
long is a barleycorn? Why l/36th
of a foot, of course.)
An inch was the width across
ROAD
N T
'ss*
YER
NEST
ON EARTH
CEMBER
1:15 PM
2:00 PM
2:45 PM
3:30 PM
CLOSE AT 4:30
Lancaster Farming, Saturday, Novamber 18,1989-B5
the knuckle of King Edgar’s
thumb- or three barleycorns. The
reach from King Henry I’s nose to
his fingertips was a yard, which
was twice the length of a cubit, the
distance from elbow to fingertip.
Originally, the mile was 1,000
double steps of a Roman legion
ary. A furlong was the length of
furrow a team of oxen could plow
before resting and an acre was the
amount of land a yoke of oxen
could plow in a day’s time.
Furlong sent me searching
again. A furlong is an eighth of a
mile, or 220 yards. (Or 23,760
barleycorns.)
Eventually, in a 1989 seed
guide mini-notebook, was found a
list that included bushels, pecks,
furlongs (40 rods), rods (16-/2
feel), leagues (3 miles'), one stone
(14 pounds), long ton (2240
pounds - or 160 stones).
There arc four pecks in a
bushel. Got that, kid?
Hey, Mom, what’s a barley
corn?
Is This
Turkey Talk
Or What?
Author Unknown
With Thanksgiving less than a
week away and Christmas just
around the comer, I thought it
would be worthwhile to share
some very informative
information.
Planning a large Thanksgiving
dinner, I had to do a little research
on the cooking time of the turkey. I
discovered that the more a turkey
weighs the less you cook it. For
instance, you cook a six-pound
turkey for 20 to 25 minutes per
pound, a 12-pound turkey for 15 to
20 minutes per pound and an
18-pound turkey for 13 to 15
minutes per pound.
Plotting the lime on a graph, it
works out that you don’t have to
cook a 35-pound at all and a
200-pound turkey will heat the
house to 350 degrees for eight
days. All you have to do is feed that
hummer 30 to 40 pounds of chick
en feed every day, fix him a little
nest in the guest room and your
energy worries are over.
There arc some drawbacks that
should be considered. One, turkeys
are very difficult to house break.
Large turkeys are particularly
stubborn and react to discipline by
burying their masters in the
sandbox.
Second, turkeys are very dumb.
They often chase parked cars and
fall in love with them. Extremely
large turkeys present a real hazard
to foreign cars during certain
seasons.
Finally, turkeys are very rank
conscious. They demand respect
from lower-ranking tutkeys, hate
second lieutenants and eat kernels.
SB
BE