09/22/2026
The first picture is the Holt combine talked about in the article, the second is the Poole threshing outfit from Springhill and the third is the Drayson/ Davidson threshing outfit.
It is fall and as I drive in the country, I witness the power of the huge combines moving through the fields steadily eating up the crops. The air fills with the harvest dust as the semi-trucks are being filled. It is quite a different scene from my farmer father’s harvesting days. His last combine was a Super 92 Massey Fergusen with a cab. It had a hydrostatic drive that allowed you to turn on a dime at the end of the swath to get back on the next swath. The hopper held 60 bushels of wheat.
Harvesting has come a long way since the days when farmers had to cut down the crop with a scythe or a cradle, gather it up and bind it into sheaves, separate the kernels by beating the cut stalks with a flail and separating the kernels from the chaff by winnowing. A strong man could cut two to three acres per day and a second man following along would gather it up and bind it into sheaves. A man with a flail could thresh about 7 bushels of wheat a day.
When the threshing machines came on scene the larger ones took 25-30 men to run the operation. Eight teams of horses hauled sheaves with several men per team. Each load of sheaves had to be unloaded, the wire that held the sheaves together untied and then men to feed the sheaves to the thresher. As well there needed to be an engineer to run the steam engine, a fire man to feed the steamers, a waterman to keep water in the steamer’s tank, and a separator person to keep everything oiled and in working order on the thresher. Then the poor women who had to feed the men five times a day!
As machines were being invented to combine all three operations (reaping, threshing, winnowing) into one operation this led to the invention of the combine harvester, or combine. Over the years inventors kept improving the combine to drastically reduce manpower and sped up the harvesting process.
In Saskatchewan, just west of the Manitoba border new farmers were settling the Sand Plains. In 1910 several wet years began. This sandy soil produced earlier crops than the heavier soil. Those wet years encouraged two farmers, Colin Shand and Harry Edmonds to order a Holt Combine Harvester and Thresher imported from California. This new machine was unloaded at Grand Trunk Pacific siding at Welby in the early fall. The two partners were farming a little more than two sections of light sand near Welby. The Shand-Edmonds farming enterprise was discontinued in 1914, and the combine was left on the farm. It was used for scrap metal during the First World War.
The following is taken from a Saskatchewan historical marker recalling “First Harvest of Saskatchewan Grain by Combine:
“Measuring 30 ft x 42 ft and capable of cutting a 20-foot swath, the Standard Level Land Machine used by Edmonds and Shand was pulled by a 30-60 hp Hart-Parr gasoline tractor. A wagon hitched to the rear collected the grain as it was threshed. Power to drive the combine was supplied through huge ground wheels and, as in many other giants of the day, the bulk of the implement was made up of gears and chains necessary to transmit power to other moving parts. Considering the size and complexity of the machine, it is not surprising that a full day was required to make the first round of the field. Prior to the combine, the typical threshing crew consisted of 20 to 30 workers, while a combine crew consisted of only four or five men to operate the combine.
One shortcoming of machine was its failure to eliminate w**d seeds. In their last year of farming, Edmonds and Shand lost 4 carloads of grain that had been heated and spoiled by green seeds.
Acceptance of the combine was slow on the prairies. Its advantages were savings in time and labour, but moist unpredictable climate posed a serious problem. Since wheat seldom ripened evenly, the early harvested crops usually contained green seeds and late harvested crops usually had already begun to shell out in the field. However, during the First World War, the manpower shortages necessitated greater dependence on machines, a trend which continued after the war when farmers, faced with increased wages and lower prices for grain, turned towards increased use of the combine.”
In 1922, Massey-Harris (now Massey Ferguson) sent one of its pull-type combines to the Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Dominion Experimental Farm for testing and use on the prairie. At that time many other companies were building their versions of the combine such as International Harvester and J.I. Case. This marked the beginning of combine use in western Canada. In 1925 there were 17 combines in use in the three western provinces and by 1930 there were over 9,500.
The combines of today have cabs that have climate-controlled comfort, seats with electronic controls and lumbar support, touchscreens that monitor each combine’s performance, check fuel consumption, yields, moisture sensors, autosteer, and so much more. This is not our grandpa’s farm equipment.
