Gasoline engine powered baler at the Winegarten Picnic and Farm Equipment Show. Winegarten, Missouri, 31 July 2016.
This baler is baling the straw that came from a previous farming operation called threshing.
The leftover product of threshing grain from the wheat stalk is straw. Straw is not hay. Hay is grasses and clover that are edible for horses and cattle. Straw is used for bedding for horses, cattle, chickens and hogs. Straw is also used for erosion control.
A baler is a piece of farm machinery used to compress a cut and raked crop (such as hay, cotton, straw, or silage) into compact bales that are easy to handle, transport, and store. Several different types of balers are commonly used, each producing a different type of bale - rectangular or cylindrical, of various sizes, bound with twine, strapping, netting, or wire.
In the early 20th century, hay and straw was cut by hand and most typically stored in haystacks. In the 1860s mechanical cutting devices were developed; from these came the modern devices including mechanical mowers and balers. In 1872 a reaper that used a knotter device to bundle and bind hay was invented by Charles Withington; this was commercialized in 1874 by Cyrus McCormick.[1] In 1936, Innes invented an automatic baler that tied bales with twine using Appleby-type knotters from a John Deere grain binder; an improved version patented by Ed Nolt in 1939 was more reliable and became commonly used.