Just to clairify, when i worked for the family while growing up, there was no pay other than plenty of ammo, clean clothes, great chow, and a few dollars in my pocket come fair time. It was when i went to work for the professional truck loader and hauler for the summer in my late teens that i made the huge sum of $3.00/hr.
Some years, the stars all lined up and we would have weather when we needed it and we could make Barley instead of hay. Grandpa knew the guys with Combine Harvesters and the big rig trucks that hauled the barley away. We had our own "bankout wagon truck", a mid sized truck that also had a holding bin on it but nowhere near the size of the big rigs. The old harvesters would cut off and chew up the tops of the barley stalks, spit out the chaft, and when it's own small bin was full, discharge the grain into the big truck bins for hauling to market.
We almost always used our own barley for seed. Some of this barley to be harvested was a ways away from where the big trucks could park so we used our bankout truck to hold that seed. On the back of that trucks bin was two slide shoots that you could open and close. There was two nail like hooks wielded under each shoot. I remember learning to hook a gunny sack on those "hooks", opening the shoot until the sack was about full, bumping it with my knee so the sack filled evenly, and closing the shoot at the right time when the sack was about full. Pull it off the hooks and using a bent sack needle and rough twine, make two half hitches on the right hand dog ear. Then push and pull your pre-cut sack twine all pretty and even like, sewing across top top of the sack until reaching the other side corner where you'd make another dog ear and two more half hitches on that. Cut the twine with the sharp needle edge on the point side of the twine hole and you had just built a sack of barley! Put it on the hand dolly, bottom one on edge, an build another sack... Once you had a dolly full, it didn't take long once you got the hang of it, you wheeled it in the grainery to dump the sacks against the others. If you stacked the dolley right and pushed it againt the others just right, the load wouldn't fall over and have to be hand stacked. On good years we'd buck up sacks on top of those that were all lined up pretty to make room for more sacks. After a day or two of making sacks of barley, you felt like you done something!
Me and my Uncle Russ, 3 years older than me, both learned and took over these duties from our elders, we usually did this chore but i remember helping with it and watching them build sacks long before i could ever hope to lift one of those heavy sacks. It was harvest time and having plenty of barley to make seed was one thing but when those big rigs made several trips each to where they took the grain was another reason to rejoice. There would be a good grain check that year! Grandpa might smile more than normal for a few days but other than that you'd never know it because there was no "extra" money, no new trucks to buy or things like that, it's just what we did and now that the barley was taken care of, it was time to cut the barley stalks off short and make straw, a whole nother process.
Joey