Making fodder, cider, syrup, soap

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

GILFILLAN -- Charlie Steffl remembers way back when two tractors, a press and a fodder cutter were all you needed to harvest a crop.

"When I was a kid, we used to call that a silo filler," he said, pointing to the fodder cutter, which blows chopped stalks out of a chute into a bin. "We used to blow it up into the silo and it could shoot about 30, 40 feet. Once it got full, we put a man up there to help tramp it down. When it was all done, we'd put a bag of flour in, and he'd come out completely white."

Like a few others who came out to the Gilfillan Farm, Steffl was helping with fall chores the old-fashioned way as a part of the annual Fall Fest, an event started by the Friends of Gilfillan four years ago.

The majority of the work for Fall Fest is processing sorghum, a tall plant grown very much like corn that is used to make syrup, which can be boiled down into sugar.

Two old-fashioned but different methods were on display. One used the tractors. The other used a horse that walked around in a circle, turning a grinder while two people fed the sorghum stalks into the machine, thereby replicating the method most farmers used in the 1800s.

Fall also means pressing apples. Again, two different methods were on display. You could use the hand-cranked apple press or you could feed basket after basket of apples into the motorized version, which crunches the apples and drops them into a cask, which then comes under a press.

Add some sugar and let the mixture ferment a little, and you've got apple cider. Just about everybody who come to the festival received a sample in a paper cup.

A few feet away, demonstrators were busy grinding up beef fat to put in a boiling pot to make homemade soap. A plain sheet of paper on the table explained the process clearly: start with some rain water, then some lye, then some ammonia, then some kind of soap like 20 Mule Team, add some rendered animal fat and wait about three weeks.

There was a foil pan full of the finished product sitting next to a handmade soap cookbook on the table for visitors to inspect. The end result was greasy, gray and thick. It sold for 50 cents a bar.

Another fall chore is making horseshoes, as Gibbon farrier R. J. Guska, Jr., can attest. Guska demonstrated how horseshoes are nailed to the horse's feet. He said the old horseshoes that come off usually go over the door to the barn, bringing good luck to anyone who enters or exits the barn beneath them.

"Horseshoes have to go upside down or the luck will run out," Guska told one festgoer.

But like hand-cranked apple presses and fodder cutters, blacksmithing has waned in the last 80 years even though it still captures a way of life once common on the southwestern Minnesota prairie.

"These are just fall chores like in the 1930s," said Harold Lange, a Friends of Gilfillan member from Clements who volunteers his time at the farm.

"It's been real popular these past few years," he said.