Couple of additional points here.  This is Kansas!  It was probably 40°C when that picture was taken.  Also, threshing machines were VERY loud.

I am just old enough to have seen a threshing crew in action.  The work was very hard but this is the harvest--there is a joy that a growing season's worth of effort has paid off.  The amount of food it takes to keep the threshers fed is staggering so in addition to the crew you see--there is another crew of mostly women who cooked from dawn until late at night just to keep them going.

So threshing is about cooperation between neighbors.  It is mostly just hot dirty work but there is also an incredible amount of skill on display--social organization, mechanical maintenance, understanding when plants are perfectly ripe for harvest, etc.

Seeing threshing crews in action affected my political outlook.  When I was a university student studying political science, I had an arrogant prick for a professor who one day asserted that Marx had made fun of "the idiocy of rural life."  I thought of myself as a radical leftist in those days but at that moment, I knew I was NEVER going to be a Marxist.  Rural life was a lot of things but idiotic was NOT one of them.  Not surprisingly, the failure to properly organize agriculture was a chronic problem for the Marxists.

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"