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.
ELECTRICAL FARMING MACHINERY
In France, Germany, Austria, and the United States the electric motor has been turned to agricultural uses. Where water-power is available it is peculiarly suitable for stationary work, such as threshing, chaff-cutting, root-slicing, grinding, etc. The current can be easily distributed all over a large farm and harnessed to portable motors. Even ploughing has been done with electricity: the energy being derived either from a steam-engine placed near by, or from an overhead supply passing to the plough through trolley arms similar to those used on electric trams.
The great advances made recently in electrical power transmission, and in the efficiency of the electric motor, bring the day in sight when on large properties the fields will be girt about by cables and poles as permanent fixtures. All the usual agricultural operations of ploughing, drilling, and reaping will then be independent of horses, or of steam-engines panting laboriously on the headlands. In fact, the experiment has been tried with success in the United States. Whichever way we look, Giant Steam is bowing before a superior power.
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