PETROL-DRIVEN FIELD MACHINERY
On water, rail, and road the petrol engine has entered into rivalry with steam—very successfully too. And now it bids fair to challenge both steam-engine and horse as the motive power for agricultural operations. Probably the best-known English petrol-driven farmer's help is that made by Mr. Dan Albone, of Biggleswade, who in past times did much to introduce the safety bicycle to the public. The "Ivel" motor is not beautiful to look upon; its sides are slab, its outlines rather suggestive of an inverted punt. But it is a willing and powerful worker; requires no feeding in the early hours of the morning; no careful brush down after the day's work; no halts to ease wearied muscles. In one tank is petrol, in another lubricating oil, in a third water to keep the cylinders cool. A double-cylinder motor of 18 h.p. transmits its energy through a large clutch and train of cogs to the road wheels, made extra wide and well corrugated so that they shall not sink into soft ground or slip on hard. There is a broad pulley-wheel peeping out from one side of the machine, which is ready to drive chaff-cutters or threshers, pump, grind corn, or turn a dynamo at a moment's notice.
A MOTOR PLOUGH
The "Ivel" Agricultural Motor pulling a three-furrow plough. A motor thus harnessed will plough six acres a day at a total cost per acre of five shillings. It is also available for reaping, threshing, chaff-cutting, and other duties on a farm.
Hitch the "Ivel" on to a couple of reapers or a three-furrow plough, and it soon shows its superiority to "man's friend." Here are some records:—
Eleven acres, one rood, thirteen poles of wet loam land ploughed in 17 1 / 2 hours, at a cost per acre of 5s.
Nineteen acres of wheat reaped and bound in 10 hours, at a cost of 1s. 9d. per acre.
Fifteen acres, three roods of heavy grass cut in 3 1 / 2 hours, cost, 1s. per acre.
With horses the average cost of ploughing is about 10s. an acre; of reaping 5s. So that the motor does at least twice the work for the same money.
We may quote a paragraph from the pen of "Home Counties," a well-known and perspicacious writer on agricultural topics.
"It is because motor-farming is likely to result in a more thorough cultivation of the land and a more skilful and more enlightened practice of agriculture, and not in a further extension of those deplorable land-scratching and acre-grasping methods of which so many pitiful examples may be seen on our clay soils, that its beginnings are being sympathetically watched by many people who have the best interests of the rural districts and the prosperity of agriculture at heart."[25]
Will our farmers give the same welcome to the agricultural motor that was formerly accorded to the mechanical reaper? Prophecy is risky, but if, before a decade has elapsed, the horse has not been largely replaced by petrol on large farms and light land, the writer of these lines will be much surprised.