Harvest, the most critical phase of the farming year, has always required full mobilisation of resources for maximum effort during the short period when crop ripeness and suitable weather conditions coincide. Mechanical means of assistance were first used, as far as we know, in Roman times but the story of harvesting machinery really belongs to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Step by step, the sequential operations of cutting and processing corn were removed from manual labour until ultimately they were all brought together into a single, sophisticated machine, the combine harvester. Haymaking underwent a similar transformation before steadily losing ground to silage, while the harvesting of root crops was amongst the last to be fully mechanised. Many such machines have been preserved to illustrate the ingenious application of technology to the land.