This artifact was featured on our monthly social media series, "Museum Mystery Mondays."
The mystery artifact is a fodder cutter! Also called feed choppers and chaff cutters, these machines could cut fodder, or agricultural foodstuff that feeds livestock on farms. The chopper could cut straw, hay, or oats into smaller pieces for the farm animals like cows, pigs, and horses. This helped their digestion and prevented food waste. The image shows a fodder cutter with a wheel crank, patented in the 1840s, making cutting fodder much easier than a chopper without one, like the one in our collection (ca. 1825). Once invented in the late 1800s, motorized cutters made the task of chopping fodder much more efficient.
Image Credit: Sketch of a farmer using an 1884 fodder cutter from "The Growth of Industrial Art" (1892) by Benjamin Butterworth.