A harvester is a person or machine that gathers crops from fields when they're ready to be picked. During autumn harvest season, farmers use massive harvesting machines called combine harvesters that cut wheat, corn, or soybeans, separate the edible parts from the rest of the plant, and collect everything in enormous bins, all while rolling across huge fields. These modern harvesters can do in hours what used to take dozens of workers weeks to accomplish by hand.

Before machines, human harvesters worked together in teams, moving through fields with scythes and sickles to cut grain stalks, then bundling and threshing them to get the kernels. In some parts of the world, people still harvest crops this way, especially on smaller farms or in areas with steep hillsides where machines can't go.

The word can describe anyone gathering something when it's ready: apple harvesters climb ladders in orchards, lobster harvesters pull traps from the ocean, and timber harvesters cut trees in forests. Whether by hand or machine, a harvester's job is to collect nature's bounty at just the right moment, when crops have ripened but before weather or pests damage them.