STEAM IN AGRICULTURE.
As yet, the great body of our farmers have been slow in availing themselves of the natural forces in operation around them. Vainly for them does the wind blow across their fields and over their hill-tops. It neither thrashes nor grinds their grain; it has ceased even to separate it from the chaff. The brook brawls and foams idly adown the precipice or hillside: the farmer grinds his grain, churns his cream, and turns his grindstone, just as though falling water did not embody power. He draws his Logs to one mill, and his Wheat, Corn, or Rye to another, and returns in due season with his boards or his meal; but the lesson which the mill so plainly teaches remains, by him unread. Where running or leaping water is not, there brisk breezes and fiercer gales are apt to be. But the average farmer ignores the mechanical use of stream and breeze alike, taxing his own muscle to achieve that which the blind forces of Nature stand ready to do at his command. It may not, and I think it will not, be always thus.
Steam, as a cheap source of practically limitless power, is hardly a century old; yet it has already revolutionized the mechanical and manufacturing industry of Christendom. It weaves the far greater part of all the Textile Fabrics that clothe and shelter and beautify the human family. It fashions every bar and every rail of Iron or of Steel; it impels the machinery of nearly every manufactory of wares or of implements; and it is very rapidly supplanting wind in the propulsion of vessels on the high seas, as it has already done on rivers and on most inland waters.
Water is, however, still employed as a power in certain cases, but mainly because its adaptation to this end has cost many thousands of dollars which its disuse would render worthless.
I am quite within bounds in estimating that nine-tenths of all the material force employed by man in Manufactures, Mechanics, and Navigation, is supplied by Steam, and that this disproportion will be increased to ninety-nine hundredths before the close of this century.
For Agriculture, Steam has done very much, in the transportation of crops and of fertilizers, but very little in the preparation or cultivation of the soil. Of steam-wagons for roads or fields, steam-plows for pulverizing and deepening the soil, and steam-cultivators for keeping weeds down and rendering tillage more efficient, we have had many heralded in sanguine bulletins throughout the last forty years, but I am not aware that one of them has fulfilled the sanguine hopes of its author. Though a dozen Steam-Plows have been invented in this country, and several imported from Europe, I doubt that a single square mile of our country's surface has been plowed wholly by steam down to this hour. If it has, Louisiana—a State which one would not naturally expect to find in the van of industrial progress—has enjoyed the benefit and earned the credit of the achievement.
Of what Steam has yet accomplished in direct aid of Agriculture, I have little to say, though in Great Britain quite a number of steam-plows are actually at work in the fields, and (I am assured), with fair success. Until something breaks or gives out, one of these plows does its appointed work better and cheaper than such work is or can be done by animal power; but all the steam-plows whereof I have any knowledge seem too bulky, too complicated, too costly, ever to win their way into general use. I value them only as hints and incitements toward something better suited to the purpose.
What our farmers need is not a steam-plow as a specialty, but a locomotive that can travel with facility, not only on common wagon-roads, but across even freshly-plowed fields, without embarrassment, and prove as docile to its manager's touch as an average span of horses. Such a locomotive should not cost more then $500, nor weigh more than a tun when laden with fuel and water for a half-hour's steady work. It should be so contrived that it may be hitched in a minute to a plow, a harrow, a wagon, or cart, a saw or grist-mill, a mower or reaper, a thresher or stalk-cutter, a stump or rock-puller, and made useful in pumping and draining operations, digging a cellar or laying up a wall, as also in ditching or trenching. We may have to wait some years yet for a servant so dexterous and docile, yet I feel confident that our children will enjoy and appreciate his handiwork.
The farmer often needs far more power at one season than at another, and is compelled to retain and subsist working animals at high cost through months in which he has no use for them, because he must have them when those months have transpired. If he could replace those animals by a machine which, when its season of usefulness was over, could be cleaned, oiled, and put away under a tight roof until next seeding-time, the saving alike of cost and trouble would be very considerable.
When our American reapers first challenged attention in Great Britain, the general skepticism as to their efficiency was counteracted by the suggestion that, even though reaping by machinery should prove more expensive than reaping by hand, the ability to cut and save the grain-crop more rapidly than hitherto would over-balance that enhancement of cost. In the British Isles, day after day of chilling wind and rain is often encountered in harvest-time: the standing Wheat or Oats or Barley becoming draggled, or lodged, or beaten out, while the owner impatiently awaits the recurrence of sunny days. When these at length arrive, he is anxious to harvest many acres at once, since his Grain is wasting and he knows not how soon cloud and tempest may again be his portion. But all his neighbors are in like predicament with himself, and all equally intent on hurrying the harvest; so that little extra help is attainable. If now the aid of a machine may be commanded, which will cut 15 or 20 acres per day, he cares less how much that work will cost than how soon it can be effected. Hence, even though cutting by horse-power had proved more costly than cutting by hand, it would still have been welcome.
So it is with Plowing, here and almost everywhere. Our farmers have this year been unable to begin Plowing for Winter Grain so early as they desired, by reason of the intense heat and drouth, whereby their fields were baked to the consistency of half-burned brick. Much seed will in consequence have been sown too late, while much seeding will have been precluded altogether, by inability to prepare the ground in due season. If a machine had been at hand whereby 15 or 20 acres per day could have been plowed and harrowed, thousands would have invoked its aid to enable them to sow their Grain in tolerable season, even though the cost had been essentially heavier than that of old-fashioned plowing. I traversed Illinois on the 13th and 14th of May, 1859, when its entire soil seemed soaked and sodden with incessant rains, which had not yet ceased pouring. Inevitably, there had been little or no plowing yet for the vast Corn-crop of that State; yet barely two weeks would intervene before the close of the proper season for Corn-planting. Even if these should be wholly favorable, the plowing could not be effected in season, and much ground must be planted too late or not planted at all. In every such case, a machine that would plow six or eight furrows as fast as a man ought to walk, would add immensely to the year's harvest, and be hailed as a general blessing.
I recollect that a German observer of Western cultivation—a man of decided perspicacity and wide observation—recommended that each farmer who had not the requisite time or team for getting in his Corn-crop in due season should plow single furrows through his field at intervals of 3 to 3-1/2 feet, plant his Corn on the earth thus turned, and proceed, so soon as his planting was finished, to plow out the spaces as yet undisturbed between the springing rows of Corn. I do not know that this recommendation was ever widely followed; but I judge that, under certain circumstances, it might be, to decided advantage and profit.
I have not attempted to indicate all the benefits which Steam is to confer directly on Agriculture, within the next half-century. That Irrigation must become general, I confidently believe; and I anticipate a very extensive sinking of wells, at favorable points, in order that water shall be drawn therefrom by wind or steam to moisten and enrich the slopes and plains around them. Such a locomotive as I have foreshadowed might be taken from well to well, pumping from each in an hour or two sufficient water to irrigate several of the adjacent acres; thus starting a second crop of Hay on fields whence the first had been taken, and renewing verdure and growth where we now see vegetation suspended for weeks, if not months. I feel sure that the mass of our farmers have not yet realized the importance and beneficence of Irrigation, nor the facility wherewith its advantages may be secured.