BILLINGS -- A different kind of barrel racing took place Saturday afternoon at the 20th annual Threshing Bee east of Huntley at Osborn Park.

Drivers of two vintage tractors, both John Deere models from the 1940s, pushed along plastic barrels, trying to get them to one end of a dirt arena and then turn around and push them back. As audience members looked on from a nearby grandstand, other old-time tractors waited to compete.

Inside a nearby shed, visitors to the weekend event watched a demonstration of old-time blacksmithing, in which a volunteer smithy forged a metal chain hook in a coal-heated fire. Out in another field, onlookers saw an old-fashioned threshing machine separate grain from straw, dumping the kernels of grain into a vintage truck and the straw into a pile on the ground.

Those were only some of the activities going on at the two-day event which will continue today east of Huntley on Highway 312 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event also includes a parade, a craft show and lunch and refreshments for sale. The cost is $4 per person for people 12 and older or $10 per family.

The bee is sponsored by the South Central Montana Antique Tractor and Machine Association.

"We're known around here as 'the Tractor Club,' " said club president Ken Amann.

The club puts on the event the third weekend of August. Temperatures in the low 80s Saturday brought a nice crowd to the park, which is also home to the Huntley Project Museum of Irrigation Agriculture.

The idea of the threshing bee is to keep history alive and to show what farming was like at the start of the 20th century, Amann said.

"For older people, it's to allow them to reflect on the past, and for kids, it's to see their heritage," he said.

Like other members of the Tractor Club, Amann has restored a number of old tractors, at least one dating all the way back to 1918. Amann, who grew up on a farm, talked about the original threshing bees that used to be common events on farms.

"Years ago, in the 1920s and '30s, a lot of farmers couldn't afford the equipment to harvest wheat," he said. "One farmer would own the equipment and all the neighbors would get together and do one farm at a time."

That would take a few days, he said, and then the farmers would move on to another farm.

Out in the field, Amann pointed to bundles of wheat, cut and gathered in small clusters by a machine called a binder. Then the clusters would be allowed to dry for a week or two, then gathered onto bundle wagons and hauled to the threshing machine.

These days, a combine does it all, Amann said. It cuts the wheat, separates it and dumps the grain into a truck. Where, in the past, it would take a binder a whole day to cover 20 acres, it now takes a combine probably an hour or so to do the same field, "depending on how heavy the grain is," he said.

On Saturday, three volunteers hoisted pitchforks of the straw-colored wheat and deposited it into the noisy thresher. Buckets of the grain were then taken to another machine and ground into flour.

"If you baked this into bread, it would probably look like cracked-wheat bread," Amann said, picking up a plastic bag of the finely ground flour.

Inside the antique blacksmith shop, Ben Swanke took a lunch break after transforming a super-heated piece of steel into a chain hook. Swanke, owner of Swanke Saddlery in Billings, makes saddles for a living.

He finds the ability to mold metal a useful skill in his everyday life.

"I do some of this for fun, and I make some of the tools I need for my saddle business," he said.

It takes 15 to 45 minutes to create a chain hook, he said. It can also be hot work, working over a fire heated to between 1,400 and 1,800 degrees.

Most people these days would find it just as easy to walk into a hardware store and buy a similar hook. But for the special equipment Swanke needs, that doesn't always work.

"Sometimes it's easier to make the stuff than find it," he said. "Sometimes it's easier to find it."

Back near the arena, Jessica Linam's 3-year-old twin boys enjoyed a ride on a teeter-totter as she watched them and the competing tractors. Linam, from Tulsa, Okla., was in town with her husband, Jeremy, and their other two children.

Jeremy Linam is in Billings doing some work for the Conoco Phillips Oil Refinery, and the family heard about the threshing bee. Jessica Linam said the boys found lots to like about the event.

"They love big trucks and tractors," she said.

Linam said she also enjoyed looking at all of the tractors and the other pieces of antique farm equipment.

"I never imagined that some of this stuff still works," she said.