GIRVIN—Thanks to Harold and Marilyn Riecken’s threshing bee, Francis Cool was able to check another item off his bucket list.

Last Sunday, Oct. 21, Cool finally got a chance to operate a binder.

With Harold’s son Chris at the wheel of the tractor, pulling the binder, Cool took a pass in the field of oats, sitting on the binder’s small metal seat between the reel and side discharge, every so often maneuvering the binder’s pedals to kick a few bundles of oats to the ground.

“I loved it,” Cool said afterwards. “It was a rough ride,” adding he had appreciation of folks who rode the binder when they were pulled by horses.

Harold says the binder isn’t difficult to operate, it just needs to be tripped once four or five bundles are on the carrier so the bundles slide off to the ground.

Operating the binder when a team of four or five horses pulled it, Harold says, is a different scenario. He wonders how farmers back in the day were able to manage that.

Operating a binder, stooking bundles, pitching bundles, and loading a rack were some of the old-time harvest chores people had a chance to try at the Riecken’s farm west of Girvin last Sunday.

They held a threshing bee giving people a chance to relive harvests of old or to try something new.

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