High-quality black-and-white photographs of large old machines and tools

[Toolmaker51]

Twenty mule team drawn combine. Walla Walla County, WA. 1941.

Fullsize image: https://diqn32j8nouaz.cloudfront.net...6_fullsize.jpg

re post 836, the mule team and combine.
With no clue what's going on here, examining photo revealed some details. The hitch is just pulling the machine, and it's power plant to run the combine itself, plus what ever tasks of surprisingly large crew, including filling the sacks piled on left side.
Then wikipedia......The modern combine harvester, or simply combine, is a versatile machine designed to efficiently harvest a variety of grain crops. The name derives from its combining four separate harvesting operations—reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing— to a single process. Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), sorghum, soybeans, flax (linseed), sunflowers and rapeseed. The separated straw, left lying on the field, comprises the stems and any remaining leaves of the crop with limited nutrients left in it: the straw is then either chopped, spread on the field and plowed back in or baled for bedding and limited-feed for livestock.

Combine harvesters are one of the most economically important labor-saving inventions, significantly reducing the fraction of the population engaged in agriculture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester Article may have been written by an Englishman, as I Americanized spelling of ploughed and labour-saving.

This post demonstrated likelihood many are quite ignorant of goings-on 24/7/365 to keep us fed. Though a huge probability existed the mules were bred here in Missouri.