When I was growing up on a farm in Southern Minnesota the implement used to harvest wheat, oats and soybeans was (and still is) known as a "combine". I hadn't thought much about why it was called that until seeing this picture in which two previously discrete machines - a reaper to cut and bundle grown plants, and a thresher to separate the grains from the straw and chaff - are 'combined' into one implement. At the time we used a corn picker to harvest ear corn that was then stored on the cob in big slat-sided corn cribs and later run through a 'corn sheller' so the kernel corn could be sold. Eventually corn picker heads were built to attach to the front of the existing grain combines and for decades this was referred to in my neighborhood as a 'picker-sheller' until simply becoming a combine.
Dyou know where the upper photo was taken, Mr. G? -- I'd guess Nebraska sidehill country, but I don't know my Breadbasket Provinces topography.
ReplyDeleteIt was a 1941 book and no location was given, sorry.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was growing up on a farm in Southern Minnesota the implement used to harvest wheat, oats and soybeans was (and still is) known as a "combine". I hadn't thought much about why it was called that until seeing this picture in which two previously discrete machines - a reaper to cut and bundle grown plants, and a thresher to separate the grains from the straw and chaff - are 'combined' into one implement. At the time we used a corn picker to harvest ear corn that was then stored on the cob in big slat-sided corn cribs and later run through a 'corn sheller' so the kernel corn could be sold. Eventually corn picker heads were built to attach to the front of the existing grain combines and for decades this was referred to in my neighborhood as a 'picker-sheller' until simply becoming a combine.
ReplyDeleteAnd bonus, no horse poop on the wheat.
ReplyDeleteRats, maybe Washington Hill Country?
ReplyDeletehttps://wagrains.org/wheat/
Another place I've never been. Thanks for the link to that strangely satisfying site!
ReplyDeleteI found "WHAT’S NEW WITH BARLEY" to be particularly stimulating.
ReplyDeleteIt's exciting stuff, barley.
ReplyDelete