Description: A tractor and reaper-binder at work harvesting corn. The location is unrecorded but is probably somewhere in North Derbyshire or South Yorkshire, the photographer's usual sphere of operation. The telegraph pole and the seemingly deep declivity beyond might be a railway cutting, but there are no other clues.
The tractor may be of Fordson manufacture, while the reaper-binder is an imported Sunshine model, made at the Sunshine Harvester Works in Australia by HV McKay Massey Harris. This firm later became Massey-Harris-Ferguson Ltd and then Massey-Ferguson. The reaper-binder was designed to harvest wheat, oats and barley, cutting the grain and then binding it into sheaves. The sheaves - some of which can be seen in the right foreground here - would be collected by a farmhand and then stacked vertically in groups of eight to ten to form stooks, thus allowing the corn to dry. In the original print the field in the distance can be seen to be full of stooks, harvesting there having been completed. The reaper-binder was invented in 1872 but was rendered obsolete by the advent of combine harvesters.