In this October 1944 photograph, Gerrick DeHaai, from Douglas County is driving a Farmall H tractor with an attached corn snapping machine. The photograph is one in a series of photos about the South Dakota and National Corn Picking Contest. Farmall H tractors are a medium sized row crop tractor. International Harvester produced the H between 1939 and 1953. The attached corn snapper removes the ears of corn from the stalk but does not remove the husk. A 1941 U.S. patent for a corn snapping machine describes how the machine operates this way, “…corn snapping machine of simple, durable and inexpensive construction in which the corn stalks both large and small, are firmly gripped between two rolls and pulled downwardly between them without breaking or crushing the stalks or pulling them up and in which the ears are prevented from entering between the rolls and, hence, are not shelled or crushed but are snapped from the stalks by snapping bars above the rolls as the stalks are drawn downwardly between the rolls.”