COMBINED THRESHRES AND REAPERS.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2650, 4 October 1882, Page 4

COMBINED THRESHRES AND REAPERS.

[ 'Prairie Farmer.”] Wh:le in out region of country the probl mU to »ecu re an efficient combined reaper a: d bi ader, the California grain growers are ua ug n combined reaper and thrasher. The conditions of harvesting in California ore pc ‘uliur. Not a drop of rain falls from April to October. Day after day, month after month, tho endless blue sky Riches the endlen brown plains, and sun and heat rule the landscape. Under these conditions groin is well dried before it is cut, and after cutting, there is no danger of being wet before the harvesting gong gets round. The usual reaping maching there is a header, a gigantic affair, of which almost every agricultural reader has seen an account. The long cutting bar run# in front of tho team, and is put at such a height as to take only the heads of tho grain. Behind the team a man stands on tho rear end of the polo, which is supported on a wheel fixed to turn like a rudder, and which in foot guides the whole machine. The grain falls on an endless revolving apron, which carries it to the outer side of the reaper, where it is shot into a large bis wagon always driven along side. When one wagon tills, another replaces it. The wagons carry tho heads to the stack. It requires three or four wagons, if our memory serves us rightly, to keep up with a header. Two men run a wagox), one to drive and the other to spread the heads as they are fed out of tho mouth of the shoot that inclines upward from the header. One man drives and navigates the header, standing or sitting, as we said, over tho rudder wheel at the rear end of tho pole. This machine was an Illinois invention, but proved unserviceable here because the heads lie so close in the stack as to heat, the straw being absent. It is this circumstance which has deteriorated the quality of Nebraska wheat in the last few years—wheat that is header-out. But in a dry country tho grain is so hardened that heating in the stack does not occur. Tho extreme dryness of the California summer, in foot, makes it possible to thresh the grain immediately on cutting, which loads to the combined reaper and thresher. In one t instar co with the machine, four men and sixteen horses out and put in sacks thirty acres of grain in nine hours. About twenty-five of tho combined machines ore in use.