Every fall my grandfather and many others would travel to harvest wheat in the Canadian prairies. This was before tractors were a thing or common. Quite a few people were affected when one tractor could cut more hay than a dozen men could.

Pedantic I know (this is HN after all), but I think that would be considered straw not hay.

Looking at https://ilfbpartners.com/farm/farm-facts/hay-vs-straw-whats-...

Straw is inaccurate because said grandfather is doing the harvest, not cleaning up after the harvest

Friend you are wrong. Hay is harvested green. It says straw is the byproduct of harvesting wheat i.e. what your grandfather was doing. You could have wheat hay, but you would have to harvest early. No one is going to do that.

It was wheat as stated.

But my analogy of hay being cut by men vs machinery was just that an example.