Combine Harvester Coloring Page: Free Printable PDF

Combine Harvester: History & Fun Facts

Combining Three Jobs Into One Machine

A combine harvester earns its name because it combines three separate farm jobs, reaping, threshing, and winnowing, into a single machine that used to require three different pieces of equipment and far more labor. Early mechanical reapers appeared in the 1830s, but true self-propelled combines that could cut and process grain in one pass did not become common on American farms until the 1930s and 1940s.

Before combines existed, cutting and separating grain by hand or with horse-drawn equipment could keep a large farm family and hired hands busy for weeks every autumn. Inventor Hiram Moore built one of the first working combine designs in Michigan in 1836, pulled across the field by a team of horses rather than an engine, decades before gas-powered tractors made a fully self-propelled version practical.

How the Header and Auger Move the Grain

The wide header at the front uses a spinning reel to pull standing wheat stalks toward a cutting bar, then internal threshers separate the grain kernels from the straw before the clean grain fills a tank on top of the machine. Once the tank is full, the long auger tube swings out to the side and unloads grain directly into a truck or trailer driving alongside, so the combine never has to stop working.

That header can be swapped out depending on the crop, with a wider, toothed header used for corn and a different one for wheat or soybeans, letting the same machine handle several harvests across a single season. Inside the body, spinning rotors or a rotating drum knock the grain loose from the straw, while a system of sieves and fans blows away lighter chaff so only clean kernels reach the tank, the same wheat-cutting scene captured in this drawing.

Harvest Season and Modern Field Sizes

A single large combine can harvest well over a thousand acres of wheat, corn, or soybeans in a season, running for long hours during the narrow window when a crop is ready before weather can spoil it. Farmers time harvest closely around moisture levels in the grain, since cutting too early or too late can mean lost yield or higher drying costs after the crop reaches the barn.

Modern combine cabs, like the tall glass cab shown at the top of this machine, are climate-controlled and often include GPS guidance that steers the machine in nearly perfect rows, cutting down on missed or overlapped passes across a field. Some large combines carry grain tanks holding well over 300 bushels at once, meaning the auger tube has to unload several times during a single day of harvesting a big field.

Custom Harvest Crews on the Move

Because wheat ripens at different times as the seasons shift from south to north across the country, some farms don't own a combine at all and instead hire traveling custom harvest crews. These crews start cutting wheat in Texas in late spring and follow the ripening grain northward through Oklahoma, Kansas, and into the Dakotas over several months, hauling their combines from farm to farm on massive trailers.

A single custom crew might harvest wheat for dozens of different farm families in one season, moving on as soon as one field is cut clean. That traveling tradition has run for generations and still depends on the same basic machine pictured here: a wide header, a threshing body, and an auger ready to fill the next waiting truck.