THIS week, I have been stuck behind combine harvesters. A fortnight ago, a combine was whirring away amid a cloud of dust in every field I passed. But this week, from the big skies of Northumberland to the narrow lanes of North Yorkshire, every road has had a combine at its head as these prehistoric-looking monsters clank their way home.

The current edition of Farmers' Weekly says 2005's is the second earliest UK harvest on record, but the wet spell has forced the combinasaurus from the fields with barely half the crop safely gathered in.

My takeaway cools rapidly on the passenger seat as the slow-moving snake of traffic grows longer. But this is a hell of a thing; the blue whale of tarmac-travelling devices; the giant redwood of the combustion engine, a marvellously ungainly machine.

I'm fascinated. I call a North Yorkshire dealer. Top of the range, he says, will set me back about £150,000.

"But there are so many derivatives of the beast," he warns. "Some of them have Global Positioning Satellite systems that map the crop as it is harvested to enable next year's sowing to be computer calculated - where to put the fertiliser, what seeding rate is required..."

I was enticed into buying Farmers' Weekly by the front cover boast: "Ten top tips to boost combine output". The double page spread inside doesn't disappoint. "Reduce concave clearance" is valuable advice, and "use de-awners" could be priceless.

But harvesting wasn't always so sophisticated. In olden days, wheat was harvested by gangs of five: four reapers and one binder. The first wave of reapers used sickles to whip off the corn; the second wave used scythes to slash down the straw; the binder came along to sort it all out.

The combine combined all these operations, plus threshing (separating the wheat from the chaff by thrashing) and winnowing (separating it by blowing air across it) and cleaning.

The first combine was horsedrawn in Michigan, US, in 1836, a remarkably rickety, yokelly thing.

The man credited with inventing the modern combine was an Aussie teenage genius called Hugh Victor McKay who welded various bits of kit together in a Bush smithy in 1882 to create the "Sunshine Harvester".

By the 1920s, there were herds of Harvesters, all brightly painted, sweeping across the plains of Australia, America and Africa. McKay was the biggest industrialist in the southern hemisphere.

But, like our Timothy Hackworth versus George Stephenson debate, there are those who claim that an Aussie engineer called James Morrow was the true pioneer, and McKay nicked his ideas.

Europe, though, had smaller farms and plentiful labour. No combine appeared here until 1936 when a German engineer called August Claas put one together in Westphalia. In 1953, Claas created the Herkules, the first self-propelling comby.

It was a couple of Claases that I got stuck behind this week, the red capital letters of their brandname staring over the roofs of the cars behind them.

Claas is still a class act. The Lexion harvester, introduced in 1995, has taken combining to a new level. The 20,000th Lexion was sold in Europe earlier this year; 300 of the 600 combines sold in this country each year are Claases.

"And they're right fun to drive," says the North Yorkshire dealer.

Even if your fish and chips are cold by the time you reach your farmhouse.

Published: 06/08/2005