What do they do?

Diamond said this combine can hold 8 tons of grain and gather wheat at 12 to 13 acres and hour, and gather soy beans at 8 to 10 acres an hour. He said the stationary and turning rasp bars inside separate out the grain the way a person would rolling a head of wheat between his or her hands. The combine, he said, only harvests grain, but this includes wheat, oats, barley, soy beans, and even corn, separating the niblets from the cob.

Farmer Mickey Diamond owns these pieces of traditional farm equipment. These he uses to plant and harvest hundreds of acres of mainly wheat, cotton, peanuts, and soy beans.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the combine gets its name, not surprisingly, from the primitive 1836 horse-drawn combination harvester-thresher, introduced in Michigan. Technically, Diamond said he shares ownership of the combine with Allen Edwards and Keith Campbell to reduce costs. Diamond said he had no soy planted so the combine is ready for its hibernation until the next harvest. As the combine works through acres of crops, only the grains are kept while the “trash part”, Diamond called it, goes back out into the field. “Some places up north,” he said, “harvest some corn stalks. Otherwise, it’s left on the ground as mulch.”

Not shown here are Diamond’s peanut picker and sprayer. He said the peanut harvester leaves the peanut in the hull as it gathers. “The nut is safe in the hull. It’s stored in a warehouse and then shelled at a shelling plant,” he said. The sprayer, he said, is the most important piece of equipment dispensing weed control and fungicide chemicals.

This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: What do they do?