I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings and I still don't understand how this thing works.
I watched several videos on a Combine Harvester's inner workings and I still don't understand how this thing works.
How? Generations of clever people ignored the naysayers who told them, "just do the work like the rest of us, you lazy bastard."
The only reason people go hungry is because of policy.
There's a theory in my family.
You have true farmers, then you have factory farms. Factory Farms are not just for animals. They exclusively produce cash crop, they exclusively optimize profit, they also do hardly any of the work themselves. They'll be in a combine, sure. But combines are quite literally automatic nowadays, so it becomes a second office where they're negotiated deals and labor and contracts and taxes.
The true farmers on the other hand? Way back when, before Monsanto and Tyson, farm communities took care of specific jobs for specific farms because one of those farmers found a really good way to do it, or is just much more efficient.
That left a little more time for each of the farmers to work on something they were skilled with, or do a hobby even.
Guess what was a popular hobby amongst farmers? Electric Scale Trains. These farmers also invented and designed and engineered a lot of these tools and equipment, because they had to repair their machines quicker than a service tech could come out.
So you get robust engineering out of a Farmer. Then the Factory Farmer comes in and says "Hey, I got a friend named John Deer who could mass produce these, and the non-presceint Farmer said cool."
BAM innovations stifled.
Seems history shows innovations came from many individual sources but those Factory Farms weren't a thing. Corporations did help develop ideas into products but large scale Monsanto style factory farms weren't a thing during the time combine harvesters were being invented.
It seems quite the opposite: the efficiency of the combine harvesters made factory farms much more likely.
I think you might have missed the point of my story.
Farmers were the engineers designing these things. Because that's all the kind of farmers there was.
Now we have Factory Factory farms, but there are still some small farmers doing this stuff. We don't have many true farmer/engineers left. And it's bad for all of us.
That's nothing compared to the Bagger 288
It is the savior of mankind.
BAGGER 🦊🧱 288 🦊🧱 BAGGER 🦊🧱 288 🦊🧱 BAGGER 🦊🧱 288 🦊🧱
That's technology, innovate a difference
A feat of engineering, a system made efficient
There isn't a condition, complication, or a vision
Where the answer ain't to build a more sophisticated widget, idjit
It's amazing to me that I discovered there's a new Aesop Rock album purely from the meter of this post, before clicking the link
From my perspective this "pinnacle of human ingenuity" is actually a farse, because it relies on a monoculture and is therefore unsustainable in the long term.
Don't get me wrong, the engineering is cool and I understand how important the mass production of food has been up to this point in human history, but there is another side of the story. The advent of machinery like this is part of why modern farmers use so many pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers - a monoculture depletes the soil of its nutrients and decreases natural pest control, necessitating the use of chemicals. The use of those chemicals has in turn driven huge ecosystem changes that we are only just beginning to understand the impact of (such as mass pollinator die-offs, changes to soil microbiology, pollution of fresh water sources, pollution of cropland soil, and more) as well as impacting humans in ways we don't understand since some of those chemicals make their way into our bodies.
You do know that crop rotation exists? It is absolute bullshit to say that using a combine harvester requires monoculture. You can simply rotate what crops you plant on a single field each year. This is also necessary if you care about would health and want to reduce efforts in fighting other weeds. If you also include Legominoses (idk if that's the correct word) into your crop rotation you reduce the need for fertilisers, due to them being able to fixate ammonium in the soil.
Crop rotation is a great thing but still falls within monoculture. Planting a field with only one type of thing is the definition of monoculture.
I seriously believe that cover cropping, intercropping, and examples like MonkderViete posted are the way forward - they result in higher crop yield per square foot and are more resilient in the face of climate change and pest pressure.
You should learn about the benefits of no till market gardens - they are real and they work.
Any farming will deplete the soil of nutrients over time simply because we harvest things from the plants and ship them elsewhere and don't ship the waste or replacement nutrients back. Especially considering the insect die off, which at least moved some nutrients at random, though still not likely enough to make up for removing them at an industrial scale.
One 4 meter line wheat and the next one a different crop, with 3 or 4 crops alternating, would be fine too. Especially with kilometers long fields.
Edit: sonething like this:
This is not really doable. It may be for small scale production of vegetables, but not for anything that needs great efficency. In the farming sector the trend goes towards bigger machines and bigger fields to increase efficiency and also to eliminate the need for work done by humans through automation. Concepts like this are incredibly hard to adapt, since they significantly increase the amount of work without increasing the profit. Also due to different plants having different needs it becomes significantly harder to actually harvest the needed amounts in order to make a profit.
is this solarpunk 🫴🦋
Came in to make a similar comment. Giant machines like this are a huge part of the problem in a number of ways. Their rigid design limits the kinds of environments that you can farm on, if you're trying to run at competitive scale. It also limits you to monocropping as you said, whereas a complex polycultural system would both more efficiently build soil over time, but naturally deters pests if properly designed and maintained.
They also contribute to soil infertility by overly compacting soils due to their mammoth weight. And they are not at all cheap either, and one of the contributing factors to so many farmers ending up hopelessly in debt.
The bottom line is that industrial farming is not sustainable, and like it or not, homescale and small community agriculture is going to have to play larger roles in our lives if we want to have any hope of staving off famine as resources become more scarce.
-circa the 70's- we call it 'green revolution' because we multiplied tenfold the harvests with mechanisation and standardisation. Back than the world wad hungry so it was necessary.
Today we see a weird phoenomenon where the abundance of resources changed customer behaviour and now we are causing the opposite effectes, effectively depleting the environment around us.
I can't type too much on a phone but the consistent way to learn this is following researches and learning the basis of soil maintenance, structure etc.
All that can be done with agromomy manuals and practical tips.
Even old ones really
If you can reliably predict what's going to be in your field, it's only a matter of time before you work out a machine for harvesting it.
Unreasonable people anon.
Reasonable people adapt to the world around them, use a scythe and get on with things, unreasonable people adapt the world to suit themselves. All progress is from unreasonable people.
Ps Can't remember who said it.
They use physics and fluid dynamics (read: airflow) in a smart reliable way. Like all things in nature, grain has properties such as weight and mass, that are not the same for every variety. So there you have it. Lots of experience and engineering.
The aliens sought out new challenges after tiring of pyramids.
David Macauley’s illustration in the book The Way Things Work is how I learned about the beauty of the combine harvester
Clearly a Promethean device
They're useful if I've got 20 acres and you've got 43!
Better question, why did it take us so long to come up with this.
Materials science and the ability to harness adequate energy to drive such a machine. IOW, lighter, stronger metals, durable metals, bearings, lubricants, tire materials, quality fuels, engine power which is dependent on all the aforementioned, and all of that tied to close tolerance mass manufacturing.
We really take for granted how fast and precise manufacturing has become.
Even simple things we don’t think of. For instance - Cars from the ‘80s and before had interior materials that sustained UV damage and you’d end up a with fading, cracked dash, cracking seats, etc. Windshields would crack super easy from a rock chip. Now? The vast majority of car interiors remain in very good condition other than usage wear. I’ve taken multiple rock hits on windshields with many different cars and had zero cracks.
Materials science is amazing.
Just engineering in general.
While my "google-fu" for finding resources is garbage, I have a cousin with nearly encyclopedic knowledge of engineering reference material. He's sent me things for figuring out where is safe to hang hammock chairs, acceptable bolt dimension/materials for car applications, and a bunch of other crazy niche things.
That reference material for all this just exists and is generally just accessible still blows my mind.