Cutting and threshing grain by hand · Ceded (since 1938)

Massey-Harris puts the Model 20 on sale, the first commercially successful self-propelled combine, which cuts, threshes and cleans grain in a single pass across the field.

The cutting and the threshing had already been taken separately, by the reaper in 1831 and by the drum thresher in 1786, and this ledger records each of them on its own. What the self-propelled combine took is the chain that joined them, everything from standing stalk to grain in the tank, so that work which once needed a gang of harvesters, a binding crew and a threshing crew now needs one person in a cab. That person still judges when the crop is dry enough to cut, sets the concave clearance and the fan speed to the day's moisture, and stops when the sample in the tank looks wrong. Steep ground, terraces and plots under a hectare are still cut by hand across much of the world, and seed multiplication plots are often harvested by hand to keep varieties pure.