May contain RAT!

The combine harvester crawled purposefully across the golden sea. The early-morning sun drove the last drops of dew from the crop with a heat of promised, penetrating power. A rat scurried away from the approaching Jurassic like machine. But it erred, the noise, the chatter of the knife, the splashing of the sails in the golden wheat confused it. It was drawn in; it climbed the stalks to escape the knife and became trapped as the sails compressed the stalks together. The rat was trapped like a thistle in a bale. A fruitless escape from a scythe to a prison! Its ordeal was not over. The straws cut from their anchor by the cunningly designed machine, fell with a fluid like motion on to the deck. This process freed her from her prison. She made a valiant bid for escape, only to be sliced in half by the auger. The combined harvester auger is fascinating to watch. If you’re not careful it can hypnotize you with its two helical blades which appear to have a constant perpetual inward motion, its purpose is to funnel the crop in to the elevator along with the two halves of rat.

The crop & the rat continue on their journey through the mechanical digestive system of this prehistoric beast, the next stop, the stomach. The stomach of a combine is the "drum". The drum performs the age-old task of thrashing the grain from the ear. The drum spins in its massive bearings, humming with stored rotational energy. The constant flow of bland fibrous food now contains a tasty morsel, the rat! The rat is something new, a change of diet for the mechanical stomach. Not setup to handle lumps of meat, the drum grunts and slows as it turns the rat into mincemeat. The meaty chunks fall through the concave along with the grain, which has been liberated, from the ear of the wheat. The grain, chaff & minced rat continue on their journey through this marvel of the industrial revolution. The "combined" - "harvester" is just that, a combination of the stationary steam engine driven threshing machine & the horse drawn reaping machine, a major, but unacknowledged technological break through. The drum produces two products, the straw and the grain. The grain, along with the remains of the rat are on there way to the grain tank. Once At a later stage, (sometimes years) the grain and rat are milled in to flour they will find there way into many food products, both cooked and raw. So next time you eat a slice of wholesome crusty bread with raw flour sprinkled on it, just imagine, it may contain Nuts and a bit of rat!