Thirty-five billion turves

That’s 10,000 per day! How on earth are you going to do that? Only by working hard and long hours. There is no other way.

Until one day you arrive at the peat digging field. You've already heard rumours about them, but you can't imagine what they are like. But now they are there: two huge, ominous machines. It takes at least six men to control such a ‘beast’. It squeaks and creaks, but it works quite efficiently.

You are working at the machine that is making turves for factories. Your colleagues shovel the loose peat into the machine. It squeezes out the water and spits out a long ribbon of compressed peat. Your job is to cut it into separate lumps with your chopping knife (1). Further down the line, on the setting field, a colleague is turning over the planks of drying peat (2). Mixing the peat with water into a ‘mortar’ for turves for domestic use could also be done by machine. The rest of the production process remains manual work. 

A team of peat workers produced as many as 10,000 turves a day. The steam engine made the work a lot easier.  Researchers once calculated that the peat workers in south-eastern Drenthe made no fewer than 35,116,900,000 turves in less than a hundred years!