The pneumatic-type stripper in general use is a tractor-mounted machine in which an air blast directed at the seed heads blows the seed into a receiving head equipped with a rotating spiked drum and a scrubbing screen. The air current from the nozzle and the revolving drum convey the light seed through the air duct and into a burlap bag.

HEADERS are machines that clip the plants just under the seed heads and gather the material in a catch pan. The seeds are cured in piles and later are threshed.

Combines equipped with a wheel-mounted trailer box are used in harvesting some of the native grasses, like the bluestems, in the Great Plains. The heads are threshed by the combine. The tailings are caught in the trailer box, dumped in piles, and left to cure. The straw is then rethreshed to recover a large proportion of the seed that would have been left in the field.

THE FORAGE harvester that is used to harvest green forage often is used to harvest subterranean clover and the light seed of several of the Great Plains grasses. The practice is to let the seed mature and use the unit to chop the forage and blow it into trailing wagons. The finely chopped material of the native grasses is cured and planted. For subterranean clover, the chopper is run as close to the ground as possible to pick up free seed burs. The harvested material is then threshed with a combine.

The chopper is used to harvest Arizona cottontop, needlegrasses, feather bluestems, and Texas bluegrass. The seeds and chopped forage can then be planted with a picker wheel-type cotton planter. Harvesting big cenchrus with the chopper reduces the time required to hammermill the seed burs to remove spines. This procedure is necessary before the burs can be planted.

The suction seed reclaimer is used as another combine attachment. It sucks shattered seeds from the ground during the harvesting operation and feeds them to the combine for threshing along with the incoming crop. The reclaimer recovered an average of 68 percent of the shattered seed in harvesting crimson clover. Eighty-nine percent of the seed was recovered in subterranean clover. The machine reclaimed only 11 percent of the shattered seed in birdsfoot trefoil, where the small, round, dense, naked seeds were beneath the stubble.