AGRICULTURAL EQUIPMENT:     TRACTORS: Tractors get their name from the Latin word trahere, to pull. And that’s what these mighty machines do best. From home-sized models that fit in your garage, to giant 4-wheel drive models that handle tons at a time, tractors pull equipment like wagons, mowers, tillers, planters, and harvesters.   COMBINES: Combines are called combines because they perform a combination of tasks. Specifically, they harvest, thresh, and clean grain from the farmer’s field. In fact, the name “combine” is short for “combination harvester.”  The first combines used teams of horses or mules for power, while today they are usually driven by diesel engines.   HAY TOOLS: Farmers use a variety of tools to cut and harvest hay. Some of them are like enormous versions of the tools you’d use on your lawn at home, like MOWERS to cut the hay, and RAKES to gather it into rows or piles. WINDROWERS both cut the hay and rake it into long rows, while BALERS compress the fallen hay into variously shaped bales.   SPECIALTY HARVESTERS: Traditionally, some crops have always been picked by hand: Coffee, sugar and cotton bolls are tough to pluck from the plant. When coffee is ripe and  ready to be picked, it is delicate and must be handled with care. And sugar cane was cut and gathered by hand everywhere in the world until quite recently. But today’s modern harvesting equipment cuts farming costs and saves hours of backbreaking labor.   SPRAYERS: Sprayers are among the most unusual-looking pieces of equipment seen in farm fields. That’s because they have wide sprayer arms, called booms, projecting from each side of the main unit. Spray nozzles along the length of the booms dispense fertilizer and pest control treatments in precise, highly controlled amounts.   PLANTERS: Until Jethro Tull invented the seed drill in 1701, farmers planted their crops mostly by broadcasting the seed -  that is, throwing it on the ground with broad swings of their arms. That wasted a lot of seed, since most of it never sprouted. Modern seed drills, and other planting technologies, allow today’s farmers to plant in ways that are quick, precise, and economical.   TILLAGE: Tilling the soil is the first thing a farmer does. That simply means digging or turning over the ground. The earliest tillage was done with sharpened wooden sticks. Later the wooden plow, pulled by horses or oxen, was used. The steel plow made it possible to farm on even the toughest soil. Modern agriculture began around the beginning of the 1900s, when the first tractors where used to pull a variety of tillage tools, including ploughs, disk harrows, hoes, rotary tillers, and rollers.   CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT:     LOADER BACKHOES: A backhoe is basically a giant shovel, called a digging bucket, on the end of a mechanical arm which is sometimes called a stick or dipper. Even though they were originally mounted or the back of a tractor or wheel loader, today they are sometimes mounted on the front of a skid-steer or other machine. Even so, they’re still called backhoes.   EXCAVATORS: Take a backhoe, mount it on a swiveling cab, and put the whole thing on top of a set of tracks, and you’ve got an excavator. It’s one of the most useful, versatile digging tools on many jobsites. Because it can swing around in a full circle, or 360 degrees, some people call them 360-degree excavators, or 360s for short.   SKID-STEERS: A skid-steer loader, or skid-loader, has separate brake for the wheels on the right and left sides. That way, the operator can stop one side and steer in very tight circles, skidding on the tires that are stopped. That’s why it’s called a skid-steer. Because they come in so many sizes, and can accept so many attachments, these are very popular tools.   FORKLIFTS: It may sound like something you do at mealtimes, but a forklift is one of the most important pieces of industrial and construction equipment. Two sturdy steel prongs, called forks, can be raised and lowered by the operator, allowing the lifting and transportation of a variety of loads in warehouses, factories, and construction sites.   WHEEL LOADERS: Sometimes called a front-end loader, a wheel loader resembles a powerful tractor with a scoop, or bucket, attacked to the front. Unlike a backhoe, a wheel loader isn’t the best machine for digging holes because it can’t dig very deep. But wheel loaders are very useful for loading dirt, gravel, and other materials into trucks, for laying pipe, and for clearing rubble.   DOZERS: The first bulldozers were basically farming tractors with steel blades attached to the front for pushing earth around to build dams, level the ground, or dig canals. Today, dozers have tracks instead of wheels to help them get a grip on any kind of terrain, and a choice of blade shapes for a variety of jobs, from road-building, to demolition, to site preparation.   GRADERS: While most construction vehicles have 2 axles, many graders have 3, with a wide, flat blade hanging behind the front axle, out in front of the operator’s cab. These awkward-looking machines are designed to come in after the bulldozers have done their job, and fine-tune the leveling and smoothing of the ground before a road, a parking lot, or other new construction is begun.