During Summer travels through the countryside you can often see large grass fields filled with numerous large round bales of hay and straw waiting for being transported to the farms to feed animals. Basically, you are witnessing another agricultural engineering invention that has helped farmers around the world to complete their harvesting so much more efficiently.

In the industrial development of agriculture, the combine harvester machine is one of the most impactful technical inventions.  As the name reveals it comes from combining 3 different harvesting operations (mowing, threshing, and cleaning seeds) into one single process. The combine can harvest a wide variety of different crops such as corn, grain, oats, sunflowers, and rye. The straw that remains after the harvesting is left on the land to dry. When the straw is dry the farmer can spread and plowed back into his land. Alternatively, he can process the straw into round bales and collect them as food for his horses and/or cows.