Custom cutters: A history of custom combining on the Great Plains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To farmers on the Great Plains custom combining is an accepted institution, one so taken for granted that its origins are obscure.This study refreshes the memory of those beginnings and traces the development of the business to the present.The subjects of the study are known variously as "custom combiners," "custom harvesters," "contract harvesters," and "wheaties," but most often as "custom cutters."Owners of combines may do custom work locally, but I focus here on itinerant custom cutters who travel north with the harvest.The geographic scope is the Great Plains of the United States, with occasional attention to parallel developments in Canada.My perspective is frankly environmental, interpreting custom combining as one of the many peculiar adaptations that characterize life on the Great Plains.Sou...""'Ces for writing the history of custom combining are massive and yet fragmentary.I have made certain decisions as to documentation that should be explained.. Sometimes generalizations in the ~ext were based on too many sources to list, and so I have cited only the most important sources.This was necessary because there were few secondary sources to rely on, In other cases the text may run for pages without a footnote, Many of my statements about the operations and lives of custom cutters stem from personal observation of work in the field and informal conversations with harvesters in such places as elevators or iii cafes, contacts too infomal to be temed "interviews," To footnote personaJ.observation seemed pompous.This work should be regarded as broad and exploratory.Economists, geographers, and sociologists someday may launch more specialized and structured investigations of custom combining.I have carried the inquiry far enough to draw some significant generaJ.izations.Thanks beyond words are due to Dr. Norbert Mahnken, director of this dissertation, whose guidance and help made difficult situations manageable, Dr.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".