Threshing

Well, wheat harvest in Ecuador doesn't involve anything like a combine, that's for sure. It's a bit of a process, starting with cutting the wheat by hand with a curved, serrated knife called an oz, and piling it up in a part of the field a truck can get close to.

Then you bring in the threshing machine. We set up a sort of bucket brigade passing the wheat from the pile to the machine, where it is loaded into a chute at one end. There it passes through the thresher, with the straw coming out one end, the wheat in the middle (where the girl in the photo is holding the sack). This is definitely a job that should be done wearing long sleeves, as everyone except me knew. My arms are pretty scratched up.


This is the top part of the machine, the first step. The wood pieces with the spikes travel in a sort of circle, vertically in this picture. This mostly separates the straw from the head.The head, kernals, chaff, and all, passes over these trays, which are meshes of gradually decreasing size. At the other end is a rotating sort of fan which helps separate everything. The wheat comes out one side, the chaff out the other. The chute in the first picture is where the chaff comes out. I took these photos when we had to stop because the trays got too gunked up and we had to clean them all off.


The other side of the thresher--the wheat comes out in the middle, the thing at the end at the bottom is a sort of blower, and the belt on the right side connects to the little gas motor that drives the whole thing. The whole bottom piece shakes back and forth on the metal connecting bands. The handles, by the way, are for carrying this thing on and off the truck.In the end, from that huge pile (which was already probably more than half done when I took the picture), we had maybe 20 100-pound sacks of wheat. Of that, 3 or 4 went to the woman who owns the thresher, anouther 4 or 5 to the folks who were helping out, and HALF of whatever is left goes to the woman who owns the land, because this was rented land.

The final product--relatively clean wheat.