Dan is a farmer. He knows how to use almost any kind of farm machine, and he has lots of them. The most important is his tractor, for it is busy all year round. Sometimes it pushes. Sometimes it pulls. Or it may stand still and lend its power to other machinery.

When the frost is out of the soil in the spring, Dan backs his tractor into the tool shed and bolts on a plow. This one is a two-gang plow—it can make two furrows in the earth at the same time. Dan touches a lever. The blades of the plow lift up so they can’t dig into the farmyard and the road, and Dan chugs off to the field. Another touch on the lever sends the blades down. In a few minutes, Dan has made the first furrows across the field.

Now he has to turn. He lifts the plow and steps on the left brake pedal. While the big left wheel stands still, the right one keeps going and turns the tractor, ready to start the next furrows. When Dan wants to stop, he steps on both the left and right brake pedals at once.

After plowing comes harrowing. The tractor pulls a different implement for this job—a whole row of saucer-shaped metal discs that chew up the soil and spread it out evenly. Now Dan is ready to plant corn.

The corn planter does five jobs in one trip down the field. It makes trenches for two rows of corn. It drops corn seeds into the trenches. It drops fertilizer alongside to give food to the young plants. It covers the seeds. And it leaves a mark all along the field to show exactly where the tractor should go to plant the next row of seeds. Dan follows the mark very carefully. All the rows must be exactly the same distance apart, because the tractor will have to go through the field again to cut out the weeds after the corn starts to grow. If the rows are badly spaced, the tractor wheels will squash some of the plants.

When Dan was a little boy, he used to help his father hoe the corn by hand, getting rid of weeds and loosening the soil. Now he has an implement called a cultivator which does the job.

After the corn is well up, Dan pulls the cultivator through the field, driving carefully, with the wheels between the rows. Small blades on the cultivator cut through the weeds and break the soil into loose chunks. The pictures show several kinds of cultivator blades.

All summer long the corn grows tall. Dan waits till the ears are dry before he harvests them, ready for his cows and chickens to eat in winter.

Dan’s farm is small, so he can’t afford to buy a big corn-picking machine. But his neighbor Al has one that he rents out, and one morning Dan drives it to his cornfield. His tractor seems lost inside the picking machine. Gatherers that look like the pointed snouts of huge mice creep along in front of the tractor close to the ground. One by one the stalks of corn go into the machine, which snaps the ears off. Then revolving claws and rubber paddles rip off the husks, and an elevator carries the clean ears back to a wagon which the tractor pulls along. In a very short time, Dan’s whole field is done.

Corn isn’t the only thing that grows on Dan’s farm. He raises tomatoes for the market, too. At planting time, he needs two helpers who ride on little seats very close to the ground behind the tractor. They put the tender little tomato plants one by one into a trench which the planting machine digs, and then a special wheel covers the roots with earth.

Dan has some wheat fields, too. In the spring, after the ground is harrowed, a wide planting machine sows many rows of wheat at a time. And it drops out fertilizer to feed the plants on the same trip.

Many farmers use their tractors for harvesting wheat, but Dan doesn’t. Instead, he rents a shiny red reaper which he calls a “package job,” because it moves itself along and does the whole harvesting at once. It cuts the wheat, shakes the grain loose from the stalk and separates it from the husks. If there are weeds growing in the wheat, the machine separates the weed seeds from the wheat kernels and spills them into different bags.

Dan sits high in the air at the front of the machine. He says he has a “box seat.” Behind him on a bench sits a helper who ties the bags as they fill up and puts new bags in place. Dan says it won’t be long before somebody invents a machine that will reap the wheat, grind the flour and bake bread right there in the field!

All of Dan’s machines are wonderful inventions, but they can be dangerous, too, if people are careless. To give himself and his helpers warning, he has painted bright stripes and markers around open places where fingers might get caught in moving parts.