TRACTOR TRIVIA and other interesting stuff 3/19/2024

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The Combine, perhaps the greatest combination of good ideas ever made.

 

Harvesting grain crops was the most labor-intensive operation on any farm prior to mechanization.

The modern combine harvester, or simply combine, is a machine designed to harvest a variety of grain crops. The name derives from its combining four separate harvesting operations—reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing—to a single process. None of this just happened; it took hundreds of innovative improvements on one-another’s ideas to arrive at today’s modern combine.

I will cover each of these operations in the coming week.

Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, corn, sorghum, millet, soybeans, flax, and sunflowers. The separated straw, left lying on the field is then either chopped, spread on the field, and plowed in or baled for livestock bedding. Combine harvesters are one of the most economically important labor-saving inventions, significantly reducing number of man-hours needed to harvest crops

In 1826 in Scotland, Reverend Patrick Bell designed a reaper machine, which used the scissors principle of plant cutting plant stems. The Bell machine was pushed by horses. A few Bell machines were available in the United States.

In 1835, in the United States, Hiram Moore built and patented the first combine harvester, which was capable of reaping, threshing, and winnowing cereal grain. Early versions were pulled by horse, mule, or ox teams. In 1835, Moore built a full-scale version with a length of 17 ft and a cut width of 15 ft. This combine harvester was pulled by 20 horses

John Deere claims to have developed the first self-propelled combine in 1946 but they seem to have missed a couple of predecessors. In 1911, the Holt Manufacturing Company of California produced a self-propelled harvester. Their 1888 14-foot cutting bar combine was pulled by an 18-horse team so a self-propelled version was a vast improvement.

In 1923 in Kansas, the Baldwin brothers and their Gleaner Manufacturing Company patented a self-propelled harvester that included several other modern improvements in grain handling. The Gleaner used Fordson engines; early Gleaners used the entire Fordson chassis and driveline as a platform.

 

In the 1920s, Case Corporation and John Deere made tractor drawn combines with a second engine on the combine to power it.

Pull-type combines became common after World War II as many farms began to use tractors. These combines used a shaker to separate the grain from the chaff and ejected the straw while retaining the grain. Later combines were PTO-powered as larger, more powerful tractors became available. These machines either fed the grain into bags that were then loaded onto a wagon or truck, or had a small bin that stored the grain until it was transferred to a grain wagon.