Sure, I know what's going on. They are harvesting grain and that machine behind the tractor is a threshing machine. What you don't see in this pic is the buffalo hide drive belt, usually about 10 or 12 inches wide, that runs from the flywheel back to operate the threshing machine sometimes as far as 40 feet away. You can see just a little bit of the belt, it's that dark line that runs from the top of the back wheel to the thresher. The horizon is just below that line, and the guy there is checking the belt to see if it is running true. If the belt starts to walk off the pulleys then they have to move the whole tractor and try to line it up better. He also has to keep an eye on the tension on the belt so they don't wear it out prematurely.
The engineer is only really concerned with the running of the engine itself.
The guy on top of the thresher is feeding the machine and keeping the hay from clogging up the works. Probably the most dangerous job there. One false move and............
The guy on the ground beside the thresher is feeding hay to the guy on the top. You can just sort of make out his pitchfork laden with hay as he is just throwing it up.
What you don't see in this pic is the crew of guys loading the bales on a wagon to the right of the pic, or the gang of fellas who are hauling the raw hay over to the machine. Quite the operation!
I think threshers are fascinating machines. But I'm from the west coast. The farmers here in Saskatchewan have no use for the old threshers and they mostly rot away in fields. My brother-in-law, Delbert, who is a farmer just outside of Melville has an old thresher lying on its side in a slough. I was out for a ride on his quad one afternoon and came accross this immense complicated machine. They are quite big. I stopped and just looked at the thing for about a half hour and tried to figure out what all the axles and levers did. Looked like a museum piece to me. I asked Delbert about it and he was less than enthusiastic. He said it was a nuisance and he was going to take his bulldozer out and flatten it one day just so he could stop looking at it.
Everyone wants the tractors, nobody wants the treshers.........or so I thought.
I was doing a clown-magic show in Moose Jaw 2 summers ago and as part of the festivities they had a farm fair set up with all sorts of old equipment. They had a nice selection of traction engines, some old giant single cylinder static gasoline engines and they had a threshing machine. They demonstrated the thresher as they demonstrated all the equipment. They also had a home made saw mill that ran off a belt drive too.
But the thresher caught my eye. It still looked like a lot of work, but hay went in one end, and nice bales of hay came out the other end. They threw a belt too. That really got the crowd going.
TrainClown