Lind, Washington — Combines Come to Town to Destroy Each Other

Lind is a wheat town with an annual disagreement about the proper use of farm machinery.

Its combine demolition derby takes harvesting machines near the end of useful life, reinforces them and turns them loose to hit one another until most stop moving.

A normal demolition derby uses cars. Lind apparently considered that insufficiently agricultural.

The joke works because combines matter enormously the rest of the year.

Rail transportation helped establish Lind as a shipping and service center for dryland wheat farms spread across Adams County. Modern machinery later allowed fewer people to work much larger acreages.

The derby gives obsolete equipment one final assignment with almost no connection to harvesting.

Many towns put the machines that built their economy in a museum.

Lind lets them ram each other.