ALTAMONT — Buckwheat kept the sweeping fields of Pleasant View Farms above the Great Depression and Everett Rau still plows those fields with the tractor and plow that his brother bought in 1929.
"Most people started the day with buckwheat pancakes," said Rau of the 1930’s. He and his brother planted their family’s 135-acre farm on Lainhart Road with buckwheat, and a flour mill in Galway bought all of it, Rau said.

Now, he uses the tractor to teach people about the history of farming, a lesson that is dear to him. For years, he has grown spring wheat on his family’s farm, harvesting it with antique equipment, and he has demonstrated the use of historic farm machinery at the Altamont Fair.
Between 1830 and 1880, there was great progress in the evolution of farm machinery. Since then, Rau said, not much has changed. "Believe it or not, the $300,000 combines they use out West, use the very same principals," he said, comparing today’s agricorporate technology to the equipment developed in the middle of the 19th Century.

By 1830, villages had developed in America and, for the first time, there was a significant population that wasn’t able to grow all of its own food, Rau said. This demand for food required that farmers produce more food, more efficiently.
"For thousands of years, grain was cut with a sickle, then a scythe, then a cradle," said Rau. With the most efficient of the three, the cradle, the grain still required threshing. A man could only thresh about five or six bushels of wheat in a day, he said, and a day was "from first light to first dark."
After a threshing machine was developed, there was still the cleaning and separating process, said Rau. "Heretofore, they would have a winnowing basket," which farmers would use to throw the wheat up into the air so that the chaff would blow away and the wheat would fall into the basket again. This early separating process is why barns were built with Dutch doors, Rau said; they served as a "manual wind-velocity adjustment."

A fanning mill replaced the winnowing basket, and, by 1880, there were machines that could cut, bind, and thresh the grains.
Rau still uses the antique machines because it’s important to pass the history on to younger generations, he said. It’s the same reason he cares about restoring his family’s 19th-Century Dutch barns. "To me," he said, "there’s a physical history to an old building, but there’s a spiritual history, too."
When the country plunged into the Great Depression after the stock market crashed in 1929, "Here, we never knew it," Rau said, standing on the farm that has been in his family for generations, since the 1700’s. Reading about soup lines and suicide in the newspapers "blew my mind," he said. His family was stable with their equipment and crops. "The buckwheat saved this farm," said Rau.