The interesting thing in the youtube is the contrast in technologies present in that combine outfit. The combine is drawn by more teams than I could count. The combine itself is driven by a gasoline engine (aka: "power unit"), and the exhaust stack and elevated air cleaner are seen in the youtube. The wheat, instead of being held in a "grain tank" or on-board bin (as is the case on modern combines), is filling sacks aboard the combine. One combine hand is manually sewing the sacks closed and dropping them to the ground via a chute as the combine moves along.
The whole outfit is quite an interesting study. I wonder why, if the combine was driven by an on-board engine, it was not being pulled along by a tractor. A lot of this style of combine were often pulled by 'Cat tractors. It would seem like an incredible amount of work and expense to have that many head of draft horses to pull the combine in an era when tractors were already a well-developed thing.
When I was working in Wyoming as a young engineer, I got laid off as the job wound down for me. A ranching family invited me to stay on their ranch, saying they could not see why I'd want to head back east. I agreed, but only on the condition that I be put to work. They had a custom combining outfit consisting of three combines (massey Ferguson combines), along with trucks with grain dump bodies and special trailers to haul the combines, an office trailer/cook shack, and a bunkhouse truck on an old cornbinder (International Harvester) truck chassis. The combine outfit was down on the Western Slope of Colorado, and a hail storm had beaten down the wheat, so harvest was delayed. During the delay, some of the combine hands had up and quit. I was asked if I'd go down to the Western Slope and help finish out the season with the combine outfit. I said I would on condition that I would not run a combine. I did not want to learn on the job on sloping fields, nor risk tearing up or putting a combine on its side. I had a commercial driver's license for heavy trucks, and said I'd be happy to drive the grain trucks, cook for the crew and service the combines. I spent a few weeks tramping around with the combine outfit. It was quite an education for me.
The combine operators would sleep late, while the boss and I were up early. I'd drive the mechanic truck into the town where the grain elevator was, let them know how many acres we'd be cutting, then buy a couple of hundred gallons of diesel fuel for the combines and the grain trucks. Come back to the campsite, fuel all the trucks and combines, then check fluids, belts, screens, and check for anything worked loose or out of place and fix it. After that, the boss and I would get breakfast on. We'd wake the combine hands about 9 AM. We'd start the combines while the hands were eating breakfast. By about 10 AM, the dew was evaporated off the wheat and combining could start.
The grain trucks were once cab-over-engine truck tractors, having Detroit 8V71N (naturally aspirated, no turbos) diesels, 13 speed road ranger transmissions and "twin screw" rear ends (two rear axles, both powered). These had been used hard in fleet service, then the rancher bought them, had the chassis lengthened and aluminum dump bodies put on. No air conditioned cabs, engines in a "dog house" in the cab, keeping the cabs noisy and hot.
We'd camp at these little places the wheat growers had set as camp sites. Nothing much there- an outhouse made of slabwood from a sawmill with gaps you could throw a cat through and a candle in a coffee can for light in the outhouse at night. Water was a hand pump on a "driven well" (shallow well with a well point driven down to water). The water was the worst part of it. It was invariably heavy with sulphur. In the mornings, when I'd brush my teeth, I'd gag on the taste of that water. That first morning, the boss was filling 1 gallon plastic jugs from that hand pump, and he put a couple up in each grain truck cab. I got my marching orders: stay in an unloaded grain truck with the engine running and keep my ears open for the 2 way radio. I'd be told where to meet a combine and would pull alongside, and the operator would "pump out" (use a screw conveyor and grain spout to fill the truck). As I'd get alongside the combine, I'd pace him, and he'd be telling me to drop back or come ahead a little to level the load. I do not recall ever tarping the load.
As soon as I had a load on the truck bed, my orders were to get to the elevator in town as fast as I could. Coming out of the wheat strips, I had to take it real easy to avoid capsizing the truck, but when I hit the hard paved road, it was balls to the wall. The altitude there was something like 7000 feet above sea level, and the Detroit diesel had a fairly narrow power band as it were. I'd get through the gears and keep those Detroits wound up around 1800 rpm, running at about 60 mph when I could. At the elevator, I'd get in a line of trucks, and sooner or later, inch up to the scales. I'd get weighed in, loaded, and a grain sample was taken for moisture content. I'd be directed to back over a grating and told to dump my load. As soon as I'd dumped, a couple of guys with scoops shovels would get in the truck bed to clean out the corners. After that, back to the scales to weight out light and get the printed ticket. I'd go screaming back to the wheat strips, and the radio was already telling me another loaded truck was waiting for me, or to pull alongside a combine.
By about noon, after a couple of hours of this, the truck cabs were sweat boxes, and the ambient air temperature had crept up. The dust in the air was choking. All of a sudden, the plastic jug of that well water tasted so good, even warmed as it was from sitting in the truck cab by the engine doghouse. No one stopped for lunch or breaks, we all worked straight through. While the dew was off the wheat, it had to be harvested.
This went on without letup until somewhere around 10 PM when the dew started to fall. The combines worked with lights on top of their cabs and I kept on driving trucks. My night vision was never really good, but the dust and unfamiliar terrain and surreal nature of the wheat strips made it a real challenge. It was near midnight before we wound things down. I'd have shared cooking supper with the boss, and gave the boss all the tickets from the grain elevator. I got off to sleep. The boss sat up with the paperwork for the day.
Every few days, after we'd "cut" in one area, we'd break down the combines, load them up on the trailers and move the whole circus to the next location. We followed the grain crop, and eventually, came back into Wyoming. We tied up the combines for winter on the ranch, and I did repairs on them and on the heavy trucks, and checked fences and livestock until hunting season. It was an education, and to this day, when I look at a sack of flour or a loaf of bread, I wonder and remember the combining and the wheat strips and elevators.
Anyone who thinks farming is any easier because of air conditioned cabs or much else has another guess coming. Any kind of farming is one of the biggest gambles a person can take. Weather, commodities prices, world politics, and the economy all are factors in determining if a farmer or someone like the custom combine outfits are successful. Another friend in Wyoming had a machine shop and sold welding gases. One of their biggest customer bases was for home delivery of medical oxygen. I was told this was for men who had "brown lung" or "farmer's lung", from breathing the endless dust whether from plowing and working dry soils, or from the wheat harvest. In the era before home oxygen "generators", the town machine shop used to have a regular business in picking up and delivering oxygen cylinders to homes. There is good reason for air conditioned cabs on farm equipment.
With what little time I spent amongst the combine outfit, I learned a lot. Seeing the youtube here, I think we had it easy with the combine outfit I tramped around with. I can't imagine the additional work in the care of that many draft horses, let alone the feed and water for them. Infinitely easier to stick a fuel nozzle into a tank on a combine, and more than infinitely easier to startup and shut down a diesel driven combine than curry, harness and hitch that many teams, and have to walk them out and care for them at day's end before putting them up for the night. But, the guys on the combine outfit in this youtube certainly came up during the era of reapers and binders, and loading the shocks onto a wagon, then feeding it into the "separator" to be "thrashed". I am sure to those guys, this combine with a gasoline engine, doing it all in one pass thru the fields, was a major step up. I saw the combines used when I was with the combine outfit, and I rode around with the boss in the cab of a combine. In those days, there was no GPS to guide the combines. The fields were sometimes irregularly shaped due to contour plowing or soil conservation practices. The result was a combine operator had to constantly be on his toes, following the rows as well as handling the controls to raise and lower the "header" (or "reel").
It took what seemed to me to be a good deal of skill to handle a combine.
I've since learned that most large scale farming field work is done using GPS guided tractors and combines. There is also software the farmers can use to determine the optimal ways to plow or sow a field. In speaking with a farmer using the modern equipment, I learned that it has become something like maintaining the tractors and implements, driving them to the field and a starting point determined by the software, locking in on GPS, starting the operation (plowing, planting, etc), and letting GPS and the software do the rest. The farmer or equipment operator is then along for the ride and to take over if something should happen.
The mention of GPS and these modern methods has me thinking of the old method of planting corn using a knotted steel wire stretched across the field. A forked lever on the planter drill followed along this wire, and at each knot, the lever was tripped, causing seed to be released and fed down into the soil. The knots were at regular intervals. A farmer had to handle a team of horses pulling the planter drill, keep the team and implement following close along the wire, and would then wind up with regularly spaced corn stalks in even and straight rows. Of course, the knotted wire would break and have to be spliced, and the wire had to be rolled up and unrolled when needed. Stakes were pushed into the soil at the edges of the fields to stretch the knotted wire between. Oldtimers have told me about this whole process, and said that there was a kind of informal competition between local farmers as to who had the straightest rows and best laid out fields. Some guys would wind up stretching the wire out of square to the edges of the fields, and this was a source of joking and kidding. Hearing about the knotted wire to space out the planting of corn, it was a precursor to the GPS and software of today, but so much more work. Even back then, the thought was to be more efficient in planting to allow for easier cultivation and better crop yields. At the same time, I keep thinking of having to deal with a reel of enough knotted steel wire to stretch across a field, as well as handling a team of horses to keep a planter drill straight and following that wire. It gives a real meaning to "fly by wire".
