Trying to Thresh Sudangrass

March 26, 1935  We went to Meade.  In the afternoon we threshed some sudan, but it did not work very well.

Sudangrass is a hybrid sorghum that was native to east Africa but is now grown throughout much of the world as a forage crop for animals.  In later years, the Siemens usually planted forty acres of it, and in fall they would chop off the heads by hand and grind them for silage to feed the cattle.  And the cattle could graze the stalks for feed also.  

In this case it appears that they had cut the heads in fall and stored them in the granary.  Now in spring they had time and were trying to thresh the grain, in other words to remove the valuable grain from the rest of the head.  They would hardly have had enough sudan to make it worthwhile to set up a threshing machine, so they may have been trying to thresh it by hand somehow, which would be a difficult task.  That may be why Cornelius recorded that it did not work very well.

Sudangrass