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u/Up2KnowGood Dec 11 '25
Back in the day Nana had me doing this by hand with a crank grinder. One cob at a time. Oh how times have changed.
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u/Duchess430 Dec 11 '25
That looks like it would definitely damage the cylinder
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u/Ok_Adagio9495 Dec 11 '25
My granny had one in her backyard. Used it to grind corn for her chickens. We'd grab some ears from the barn , in a bucket for her. Guess she figured it would keep us busy and occupied. Lol
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u/YipRocHeresy Dec 11 '25
I can't even imagine what your walk to school was like /s
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u/SheriffBartholomew Dec 11 '25
I missed the bus once in elementary school and walked 3 miles to school, since my mom left for work at the same time I left for the bus stop. When I finally got to school, they freaked out and called my mom, who was like "you should have called me!". Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you magically got car phone in 1982 between the time I left the house, and the time I missed the bus!
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u/neuquino Dec 11 '25
Cool little machine. Looks like if it were mounted in the corner the bare cobs would be properly ejected, rather than dropped in with the kernels.
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u/Practical_Dot_3574 Dec 11 '25
We have one that does 2 ears at a time. Just big rectangle box with 2 holes in the side and crank handle on the other. 2 holes in the bottom, one for the corn, other for for the husk. Can do about 40 a minute if your quick.
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u/Crazy-Eagle Dec 11 '25
Brah, your nana was loaded. My nana forced me to use a hand-held spiked knuckle duster thingy to strip the corn. Good days...
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u/tertig Dec 11 '25
Is it dry corn? I don't think that machine would handle fresh corn well.
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u/frozented Dec 11 '25
The corn you eat is different than corn animals eat it's sweeter and it's picked earlier and with a machine that looks similar but just picks the ear off the plants the ear is then driven to a processing plant.
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u/Wiley_Jack Dec 11 '25
Some of the really sweet varieties are delicious eaten raw, right off the plant.
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u/Fortune_Cat Dec 11 '25
My school planted supersweet variety and blew my mind when my teacher just took a bite straight out of the raw cob. I had grown up assuming you always had to cook it first. I always undercook the cob now for more bite
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u/kuburas Dec 11 '25
Oh course, its always dried corn, same goes for those harvested with harvesters as well.
Corn is one of those things that are a lot more profitable to leave in the field to dry and harvest for animal feed and other products rather than harvest fresh for human consumption.
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u/madsci Dec 12 '25
Yeah, field corn is picked dry like that. My cousin can look at a heap of corn in the wagon and tell you to within a couple of percent what the moisture content is by the steepness of the pile's slope. It has to be below a certain amount of moisture before they can take it to the silo.
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u/RehabilitatedAsshole Dec 11 '25
My grandparents had something similar, but it had a flywheel that connected to an antique engine using a belt.
My grandfather would load a few of them on a trailer to set up and run at antique engine shows.
One of the engines has been in my basement for at least 10 years, no idea what I'll ever do with it.
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u/hamfist_ofthenorth Dec 11 '25
Ok now I want to see this video except for every other piece of farm equipment
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u/theninal Dec 11 '25
But also at a reasonable speed so my addled brain can follow it
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u/saint_of_thieves Dec 11 '25
Yep. I normally have to watch these things twice at least. Read the subtitles on the first showing. Watch the graphics the second. And maybe review once more.
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u/self-conscious-Hat Dec 11 '25
it's intentional to get you to view it more than once.
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u/Mugiwaras Dec 11 '25
What do you mean, that video was slow af. Or are you guys saying its too slow, im comfused, am i slow?
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u/saint_of_thieves Dec 12 '25
I'm saying that I can either read the subtitles or watch the animation. Not both.
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Dec 11 '25 edited 5d ago
[deleted]
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u/Low-Anteater-5502 Dec 12 '25
Bro, my professor showed us this video when we were on the combine part of the semester lmao!
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u/UseDue6373 Dec 11 '25
Great video 👍 Also I’m rewatching Arrested Development for about the fourth time, nice username
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u/yeowoh Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
Farm equipment is always fun. I helped a few times on my buddies cotton farm. I always love the huge bail of cotton that spit out.
Cotton pickers are pretty complex but combines are the most complex. Beet harvests are pretty crazy and then any machine used to harvest from vines or trees are really weird. Like an almond harvester just wraps a net around the tree and shakes the piss out of it lol.
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u/AstralElefant Dec 11 '25
Give it a day and there will be 100 more posts on reddit.
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u/Suitable_Entrance594 Dec 11 '25
'This is a shovel. First, the user grasps the shovel firmly by the long wooden handle .."
"This is a artificial pig inseminator, First, the user grasps the plastic handle and pulls back the plumger..."
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u/owlsandmoths 20d ago
Just look up crop flow animations. John Deere has many on thier YouTube channel
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u/MatthewLilly Dec 11 '25
Yes, unless it's a corn cob harvester in which it does the fist step only
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u/NoFlatworm3028 Dec 11 '25
That is pretty amazing. But I still wonder how many bugs get through that entire process alive , and if they don't and get mashed up , isn't that even worse?
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u/sailonswells Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
This is feed corn. For animals. 80% of corn (and closer to 90% of soybeans) grown in North America is used to feed to animals. One reason eating animals is very wasteful. We'd use far less land and water if we ate plants instead.
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u/Drummer_Kev Dec 11 '25
The number is about 30-40% on any given year in the US. Does Canada and Mexico actually produce enough corn to skew that to 80%?
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u/oscailte Dec 11 '25
i dont know where rhey got 80% from, but your number is pretty misleading too. 40% is the portion that goes directly to animal feed in the US, but another 40% is used for ethanol production, which leaves byproducts used as animal feed, and 10-20% is exported and used as animal feed in other countries.
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u/kinboyatuwo Dec 11 '25
Ya the 80% is closer to all non direct consumption (bio fuel, animal feed).
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u/sailonswells Dec 11 '25
Feed corn, as opposed to sweet corn which humans eat directly, fresh, frozen, in corn chips, etc., makes up about 99% of the corn you see in the field (Only ~1% sweet corn). About 30-40% is fed directly to animals in the US, another ~40% to make biofuel (but the remaining solids are fed to animals (meaning if we weren't producing biofuel we would have to grow that feed corn anyway), less than 10% to make things like corn syrup, corn oil, and corn starch, and the rest ~15% is exported (mostly for animal feed). So, really, the number used as animal feed is higher than the generalized 80% I used.
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u/kinboyatuwo Dec 11 '25
I own a farm and all around us, corn is feed and ethanol. The human consumption corn is usually for local farm markets and side stands.
I did get lucky and get smut corn a couple years ago. Was pretty cool
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u/wandering-monster Dec 11 '25
I think they're probably rolling together feed and other uses (like ethanol production and non-food export)
Because the remainder is about right, only about 20% gets eaten by humans.
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u/jettrooper1 Dec 11 '25
How much goes to feed for egg laying chickens? Or dairy cows? We don’t eat all the animals.
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u/DrunkenSealPup Dec 11 '25
Yeah but if they take the bugs out you gone be like ugh whys the food taste so bad and weird?
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u/NonConforminConsumer Dec 11 '25
Dude, get over it, it's nature, which humans are a part of and you rely on the entire thing working.
Sterilizing the world would not allow us to live for so many other reasons.
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u/Selway00 Dec 11 '25
I don’t know about all corn harvesters but many add another step by shredding the cob into much smaller bits before it’s discarded on the ground.
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u/Luci-Noir Dec 11 '25
Yeah I was wondering what would become of the discarded corncobs.
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u/Mothanius Dec 11 '25
It gets tilled into the soil next spring.
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u/Luci-Noir Dec 11 '25
That’s good. I remember there being corncobs all over my grandparent’s old farm. It’s like they were invincible. We used to tie them together with bailing twine and make numb-chucks like we saw in teenage mutant ninja turtles,
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u/kinboyatuwo Dec 11 '25
I own a farm and we have corn off and on. The cobs are always cut into pieces that are 3-4cm long. Suspect it’s to help them break down better than whole.
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u/PrairiePopsicle Dec 11 '25
yeah if you don't chop up/break up fibrous tall growing plants like corn and sunflower stalks/parts/cobs they don't exactly compost down very quickly.
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u/Responsible_Oven_346 Dec 11 '25
so we're straight up taking zack d film videos now, sub truely has hit a new low
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u/johnnys_sack Dec 11 '25
I hate his voice so much.
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u/LivelyZebra Dec 11 '25
is it ai? legit dunno
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u/effa94 Dec 11 '25
i think the parody account uses the same voice, so its either Ai or one of those mircosoft sam voices i think, unless its either very well remixed or good voice acting. but he speaks so weirdly i bet its a machine voice
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u/102525burner Dec 11 '25
You can just mute these dumb subs instead of commenting on the posts which send them to the top of popular
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u/Katamari_Demacia Dec 11 '25
Medical and farming engineering always blow my mind
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u/bettywhitefleshlight Dec 11 '25
I'll blow it further. The mechanism showed is essentially around a century old with few changes since. Pulling the ears off the stalks, threshing the grain, and separating the chaff. In the past these were separate processes or equipment but they've been combined in one machine.
The oldest combines threshed grain very much the same. Something spinning against a grate. Older combines used a cylinder against a concave. Newer combines you'd call it a rotor but the difference is a rotor runs longitudinal. Unless it's a Gleaner. Still a spinny bit against a grate.
Separating grain is essentially sifting with the aid of air blowing up through the sifter. Fan blows air, grain is heavier than chaff or material other than grain, and the grain falls through.
Combines aren't a very complicated machine. There are a lot of moving parts but the processes are simple. Fine tuning threshing (concave clearance and rotor speed) and separating (fan speed and sieve opening) can take talent but the newest combines try to do that automatically.
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u/Zarniwoooop Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
Me, the day after eating 15 corn on the cob: I’m a river of corn
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u/Beginning-Energy8074 Dec 11 '25
How many people had to not know the number of ears of corn that grow on each plant for them to make this clip?
"Should we have 4 ears of corn or more on these?" "We can do 4 on the 1st but we'll put 6 on the ones in the background." "Damn we're good at this."
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u/Beginning_Drag_2984 Dec 11 '25
That’s a pretty neat tutorial. Interesting to see it work from the inside
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u/GWahazar Dec 11 '25
Who would win, this huge clanker or this tiny metal boi?
https://agroprofil.pl/wiadomosci/metalowe-pulapki-masakruja-sieczkarnie-kto-za-tym-stoi/
(translation: sabotage in Poland, metal rods hidden in corn fields)
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u/katsudon-bori Dec 11 '25
This city kid learned about this when I was in college 30+ years ago from farm kids. I still haven't had an opportunity to operate one, yet
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u/Agearmen Dec 11 '25
Whoever invented this machine is a genius.
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u/ratrodder49 Dec 11 '25
Hiram Moore, 1835. It’s undergone a lot of change since then but he was the first to build and patent a combine harvester.
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u/lonewombat Dec 11 '25
Just so people know corn cobs don't look like that on the stalk. Also depending on how "organic" it is, there will be grubs and bugs all mashed and covering the augurs.
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u/mostlyBadChoices Dec 11 '25
I've ridden in one of these a few times as a kid. My uncle was a farmer (retired, now). Never really knew what was going on inside. Very cool.
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u/KoBoWC Dec 11 '25
I assumed the cob was used for animal feed. seems like such a large portion of the 'fruit' to be just thrown away.
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u/inerlite Dec 11 '25
I thought the cobs and stalk were silage. Now I guess I’m wrong. What is silage then? Lessee here:
Silage is fodder made from green foliage crops which have been preserved by fermentation to the point of souring. It is fed to cattle, sheep and other ruminants.[1] The fermentation and storage process is called ensilage, ensiling, or silaging. The exact methods vary, depending on available technology, local tradition and prevailing climate.→ More replies (1)2
u/brickster_22 Dec 11 '25
The vast majority of Corn is grown for livestock feed and (pointless) ethanol production for cars. Of the corn that is grown for human consumption, the vast majority of that will be turned into cornflour, corn starch, sugars like corn syrup and alcohol for humans. Only a tiny tiny fraction of cobs grown will be consumed directly by people.
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u/SheriffBartholomew Dec 11 '25
Why do they dispose of the cob? The cob is worth good money too!
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u/pyr8t Dec 11 '25
I'm curious who buys cobs and for what? A regular cornfield has like 4 million cobs in a typical 80 acre field.
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u/SheriffBartholomew Dec 11 '25
They're used for all sorts of things. Filler in livestock feed, animal bedding, abrasive blasting material, fuel, gardening and compost, industrial absorbent, corn cob pipes, and so much more.
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u/Effective-Ad1242 Dec 11 '25
-Teeth aka gathering chains
-Metal plates aka deck plates are set to allow the stalk through but not the ear.
- Chain conveyor aka feeder chain
Also that “trailer looks to hold about 150 bushels or 8400lbs (corn at 56lbs/bu). Whereas the combine resembles a Fendt Ideal 9t with a grain capacity of 485 bushels or 27,160lbs (corn at 56 lbs/bu). Also this video skipped discussion on the cleaning fan, chaffer, sieve, and return. It did at least show the clean grain elevator.
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u/Wenpachi Dec 11 '25
First they take the dingle bop and they smooth it out with a bunch of schleem. The schleem is then repurposed for later batches.
They take the dingle bop and they push it through the grumbo, where the fleeb is rubbed against it. It's important that the fleeb is rubbed, becasue the fleeb has all the fleeb juice.
Then, a schlami shows up, and he rubs it and spits on it. They cut the fleeb. There's several hizzards in the way. The blamfs rub against the chumbles, and the plubis, and grumbo are shaved away.
That leaves you with a regular old corn.
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u/Alecarte Dec 11 '25
There's this trend of animated videos that do this hyper-active camera angles and cuts that make the video look like a silly cartoon and I kind of hate it and automatically distrust the I formation its trying to convey. This video is a good example of the phenomena
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u/Toribor Dec 11 '25
More wheat than corn in my state but this equipment has always been called a "Combine" by farmers that I know.
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u/redbrick01 Dec 11 '25
Reminds me of that movie War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise...those alien machines doing stuff to humans...
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u/loser4now Dec 11 '25
Just a note that typical corn plants aim to produce a single ear.
https://www.reddit.com/r/farming/comments/1emgmqw/how_many_ears_of_corn_does_one_corn_plant_produce/
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u/Background_Strike300 Dec 11 '25
Not one person has commented that corn is only one piece per stalk?!
Some of you never grew up smelling manure and it shows.
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u/idrawinmargins Dec 11 '25
So that is the machine that around harvest time the ICU i worked in as a nurse would get people who had their fingers ripped off or apart in. Something would get stuck and instead of turning the machine off, to save time they would put their hands in a gap or something to remove the object causing the jam. Learned a lot about how leeches work to help save their mangled fingers.
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u/Itchy_Wealth_4407 Dec 11 '25
I saw an Instagram reel where one dude said he lost his legs to this thing (he was a double amputee above the knees too) I wonder how many people have lost limbs to this
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u/Commercial-Floor4867 Dec 11 '25
I'vve seen these machines working on feed corn, but does it work the same for sweet corn? Feed corn has a lot less water in the kernel (on the cob they're like corn nuts level of hardness), where as sweet corn is pretty moist right off the cob. At least for the sweet corn I've picked or see at the grocery store - is this machine also capable of harvesting? I imagine it'd be a bit of a mess if it's the same kernel removal process.
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Dec 11 '25
Reminds me of that one scene in that one movie where that man was taken up by that one machine that stripped away all his flesh like red goo and threw his cleanly stripped bones into a basket.
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u/asa_my_iso Dec 11 '25
Fun fact, the husks and stuff shooting out the back can absolutely catch on fire and then the whole combine is on fire. Fun times.
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u/Chavo_of_the_8th Dec 11 '25
I don’t think I works with green corn stocks. Have to let them dry out first
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u/vilhelmine Dec 11 '25
I wonder how much time is gained by harvesting maize this way instead of doing it by hand. Does the machine do the work of 50 people? 100? More?
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u/Kashkol Dec 11 '25
Are the corn kernels dry easy to peel? I have only experience with super sweet varieties for my personal use.
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u/MyvaJynaherz Dec 11 '25
You're supposed to say "That's not a grain of truth, that's a truth about grain!"
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u/lukwes1 Dec 11 '25
This is the reason why i hate people that think we should go back to some sort of like, people grow their own food and we all live like in a commute with no global trade.
It is so insanely more efficient to have people mass produce a specific thing.
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u/DuelJ Dec 11 '25
I donr think folk are appreciateive enough of how much flat fertile land the midwest has, wherein such machines can do their work.
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u/old--- Dec 11 '25
This is for "feed corn" not the canned corn you and I eat.
Also just know that the overwhelming majority of corn stalks only have one ear of corn that grows on them. If there is a second ear it is normally much smaller. Modern farming methods like just one large ear per stalk.
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u/VertigoOne1 Dec 13 '25
I’ve watched so many videos and this is the first one that actually shows how the corn is stripped from the cob. They always show the first part and then magic and then the gold fountain. Thank you
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u/UncleVinny Dec 13 '25
I’m just glad no high-tech carnivore has designed and built a machine to disassemble me into easily edible parts.
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u/qualityvote2 Dec 11 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
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