Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Combine Farm Machinery

Growing up in Iowa you acquire some words without knowing just what they mean.  Take combine.  Not combine as in put things together.  Combine, like farm equipment.  My family would go past all kinds of machinery traveling on county roads. I'd point at various things with huge metal circles, enormous rakes, all kinds of Godzilla-scale doodads and ask," Is that a combine?"  I never did get it straight.  Just for you, meet the combine.  It's short for 'combined harvester-thresher'.  Guess what?  It cuts (harvests) and threshes at the same time! Cutting we got.  So, threshing. The threshing takes place in a drum where a revolving cylinder just beats that grain right off the stalks. This machine is not fooling around.  I figured combines were a fairly recent invention but they've been around since the 1830's.  Back when they had to use horses to haul them around.

Farm Machine History Books
Source:  The World Book Encyclopedia

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