Ag now and then: how technology changed agriculture in county

Although the basic principles of farming are the same as they have been throughout the ages, there are definite innovations and advancements that have made the process a bit more com-fortable and a little less work intensive. For instance, we now have engines in our machinery instead of having to power them with teams of horses, mules, or oxen, which not only saves on the workload but also removes the time for grooming, harnessing, and stall cleaning.

In the late 1800s and early

1900s, farmers in the Klickitat Valley would drive umpteen horse-drawn wagons with hand-sewn sacks of wheat down the Maryhill grade on rutted dirt roads to Columbus (now Maryhill) where they would manually offload the sacks onto the shore of the Columbia River to then be loaded, again manually, on boats or ferried across the river to Grants, Oregon, (a town no longer in existence) for shipment by train destined for Portland.

By the 1950s things had progressed and farmers were using Caterpillars to pull the thresher around the field and would then auger the grain into a waiting truck. By that time, the Maryhill Loops bypass road was being used since it was built shortly after World War II.

In 1922, the grain elevator in Roosevelt was built, and much of the wheat in the central and east end of the county was trucked there.

The addition of airconditioned cabs on tractors, combines, mowers, and balers has also been a boon not only for comfort, but also for health benefits by providing cleaner air to breathe with-out the dust and chaff, protection from skin cancer after untold hours in the direct

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Continued from page 9 sun, and a defense against heat stress by maintaining cooler

And though farmers’ clothes

still can give the person doing the laundry a run for their money, it doesn’t hold a candle to eras gone by when it seemed half the field went into the laundry along with the clothing.

Irrigation methods have also improved over the years due to advanced technology in water systems. The days of manual