Where's Jamie? Folk festival demonstrates threshing techniques from 1920s, 1930s

EDINBURGH - I'm generations removed from farming, so looking at the machinery on display at the Edinburgh Folk Festival was an eye-opening experience.

And once the threshing demonstration started, it was an ear-opening one, as well.

The demonstration was to show how farmers threshed grain in the early 20th century, complete with a tractor from the 1930s and a threshing machine from the 1920s. A belt hooked up to the tractor drives the huge threshing machine.

The machine is at once simple and complex. Stalks of oats go onto a conveyor belt, and out the far end of the machine are two pipes: one for straw and one for oats.

The process by which that happens, though, is hypnotic. Gears, belts and chains on the thresher turn, making a loud squeaking sound that competes with the roar of the tractor engine running at full-tilt.

Inside, blades crush the stalks, and the belt drags them over shaking pans and other moving parts designed to separate the straw from the oats. The oats take a ride up another conveyor belt before going into a tube over a wagon, while the straw is blown through what looks almost like a smokestack before landing in a neat pile.

Well, an almost neat pile. Because in addition to that pile, bits of straw fly through the air, coating every surface near by with a fine yellow dust.

Ken Hasler is one of the people who made the demonstration happen; it's his tractor, a 1938 Oliver 99, driving the thresher. He's helped work on a lot of the equipment at the Edinburgh site, but he still finds himself amazed at the way the thresher works.

He's not alone. Kids looked on in awe as the machine turned, and climbed up on the wagon, looking at ever-growing pile of oats.

There are newer - and, I assume, quieter - machines that do this now, but that's really the point of Edinburgh and the point of the Folk Festival, after all - to show where we've come from.