Thus, with the Gleaner name, the company evoked a positive connotation in potential customers' minds, of a brand of harvester that would leave none of the grain behind.

The original Gleaner design was mounted on a Fordson Model F. It had a retail price of USD $950 FOB at the factory in Nickerson.

The combine's Model A engine was mounted on a frame fitted for the radiator, and was coupled to a power take-off unit.

Buescher (1991)[3] credited the design principally to one of the brothers, Curt Baldwin, and explained that it focused on the needs of custom cutters like the Baldwin brothers themselves: contractors who move north with the harvest season, providing harvesting services to farmers.

[3] The Gleaner's exterior sheet metal was galvanized (zinc plated), providing superior weather resistance.

During the Great Depression, owing mostly to the collapse of the farm economy and the Dust Bowl, the Baldwins' company entered bankruptcy in the 1930s as equipment sales plummeted.

By the late 1940s and early 1950s, other farm equipment manufacturers were offering increased competition to Gleaner, having introduced their own versions of self-propelled combines.

This represented commercial renewal for Gleaner with the production and marketing success of various new models and technologies.

At the dawn of the 1960s the Model C self-propelled was made popular amongst custom harvest crews as it could be equipped with a 14 - 20 ft grain header or a 4 row corn head.

The model C also carried the specialized variations of "CR" for rice harvest, "CT" which was outfitted with steel tracks for very muddy conditions, and "CH" which was a hillside version made to market to grain farmers in the Pacific Northwest area of the United States known as the Palouse.

In 1985, Allis-Chalmers sold their farm machinery manufacturing business to Deutz AG and became known as Deutz-Allis, and in 1991 its North American operations became AGCO.

[6] The Hesston facility is 35 miles east of Nickerson, Kansas, where the Baldwin brothers started the Gleaner company in 1923.

In 1972 Gleaner was the first manufacturer to use electro-hydraulic controls, an innovation that other companies didn't offer until nearly two decades later.

Another Gleaner innovation was a "rock door" to protect the machine from damage due to stones that it might pick up while harvesting.

In 2016, with the release of the S9 series, came a completely new cab as well as the first use of a "fly-by-wire" hydrostatic transmission in a Gleaner combine, meaning the propulsion of the machine as controlled by operator no longer used a direct cable interface and was now achieved strictly by electronic feedback into a transmission control module.