The flail, rake, cradle and fork shown here, left to right, are examples of implements used in pre- industrial agriculture throughout the western world. In fact the cradle, a scythe with long wooden fingers, only replaced the sickle for cutting grain after the middle of the nineteenth century. It allowed harvesters to cut the stalks of grain, then carry them across their bodies and lay them in a swath where they were bound by reapers. This eliminated the need for an extra pair of hands in the harvesting process. The weight of the grain made cradling very arduous and dangerous work. A worker could easily cut the outside of his left leg as he released the heavy, cumbersome swath with a jerking motion. Under good conditions a cradler could cut two thirds of a hectare in a day but in rough fields stumps prevented a rhythmical sweep and fingers and blades were frequently broken on hidden rocks. During the mid-1880s the appearance of self-binding reapers or harvesters made it possible for one man to cut and bind four hectares a day.
The flail, simply two sticks of wood joined together at the centre, was used to beat grain out of the sheaves laid on the barn floor. Even a good worker could only thresh from 300 to 500 litres in a day. By 1870 Compton County had fifty-one threshing machines, which also winnowed the grain from the chaff, accomplishing a month's work in a day or two.
Harvesting hay, the principal crop of the Eastern Townships, was much less time-consuming than grain, and for that reason mechanization came later. After the hay was cut with a scythe, it was raked into windrows later to be bunched and hauled to the barn. Horse-drawn rakes were beginning to replace the wooden hand rake by the 1860s (twelve percent of Compton's farmers owned these machines in 1871), but practical hay mowers were not available until the 1880s. Small, two-pronged metal forks were common early in the nineteenth century but the long-handled wooden variety seen in this photograph was much better for turning loose hay for curing.
