Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast

by George Sutherland

CHAPTER VII.

AGRICULTURE.

Muscular power still carries out all the most laborious work of the farm and of the garden—work which, of course, consists, in the main, of turning the land over and breaking up the sods. In the operations of ploughing, harrowing, rolling, and so forth, the agency almost exclusively employed is the muscular power of the horse guided by man-power; with the accompaniment of a very large and exhausting expenditure of muscular effort on the part of the farmer or farm labourer. On the fruit and vegetable garden the great preponderance of the power usefully exercised must, under existing conditions, come direct from the muscles of men. Spade and plough represent the badges of the rural workers' servitude, and to rescue the country residents from this old-world bondage must be one of the chief objects to which invention will in the near future apply itself.

The miner has to a very large extent escaped from the thraldom of mere brute-work, or hardening muscular effort. He drills the holes in the face of the rock at which he is working by means of compressed air or power conveyed by the electric current; and then he performs the work of breaking it down by the agency of dynamite or some other high explosive. Much heavy bodily labour, no doubt, remains to be done by some classes of workers in mines; but the significance of the march of improvement is shown by the fact that a larger and larger proportion of those who work under the surface of the ground, or in ore-reduction works, consists of men who are gradually being enrolled among the ranks of the more highly skilled and intelligent workers, whose duty it is to understand and to superintend pieces of mechanism driven by mechanical power.

In farming and horticulture the field of labour is not so narrowly localised as it is in mining. Work representing an expenditure of hundreds of thousands of pounds may be carried out in mines whose area does not exceed two or three acres; and it is therefore highly remunerative to concentrate mechanical power upon such enterprises in the most up-to-date machinery. But the farmer ranges from side to side of his wide fields, covering hundreds, or even thousands, of acres with his operations. He is better situated than the miner in respect of the economical and healthy application of horse-power, but far worse in regard to the immediate possibilities of steam-power and electrically-conducted energy. No one can feed draught stock more cheaply than he, and no one can secure able-bodied men to work from sunrise till evening at a lower wage.

Yet the course of industrial evolution, which has made so much progress in the mine and the factory, must very soon powerfully affect agriculture. Already, in farming districts contiguous to unlimited supplies of cheap power from waterfalls, schemes have been set on foot for the supply of power on co-operative principles to the farmers of fertile land in America, Germany, France, and Great Britain. One necessity which will most materially aid in spurring forward the movement for the distribution of power for rural work is the requirement of special means for lifting water for irrigation, more particularly in those places where good land lies very close to the area that is naturally irrigable, by some scheme already in operation but just a little too high. Here it is seen at once that power means fertility and consequent wealth, while the lack of it—if the climate be really dry, as in the Pacific States of America—means loss and dearth. But the presence of a source of power which can easily be shifted about from place to place on the farm for the purpose of watering the ground must very soon suggest the applicability of the same mechanical energy to the digging or ploughing of the soil.

It is from this direction, rather than from the wide introduction of steam-ploughs and diggers, that the first great impetus to the employment of mechanical power on the farm may be looked for. The steam-plough, no doubt, has before it a future full of usefulness; and yet the slow progress that has been made by it during a quarter of a century suggests that, in its present form—that is to say while built on lines imitating the locomotive and the traction-engine—it cannot very successfully challenge the plough drawn by horse-power. More probable is it—as has already been indicated—that the analogy of the rock-drill in mining work will be followed. The farmer will use an implement much smaller and handier than a movable steam-engine, but supplied with power from a central station, either on his own land or in some place maintained by co-operative or public agency. Just as the miner pounds away at the rock by means of compressed air or electricity, brought to his hands through a pipe or a wire, so the farmer will work his land by spades or ploughs by the same kind of mechanical power. The advantages of electrical transmission of energy will greatly favour this kind of installation on the farm, as compared with any other method of distribution which is as yet in sight.

For the ploughing of a field by the electric plough a cable will be required capable of being stretched along one side of the area to be worked. On this will run loosely a link or wheel connected with another wire wound upon a drum carried on the plough and paid out as the latter proceeds across the field. For different grades of land, of course, different modes of working are advisable, the ordinary plough of a multifurrow pattern, with stump-jumping springs or weights, being used for land which is not too heavy or clayey; a disc plough or harrow being applicable to light, well-worked ground; and the mechanical spade or fork-digger—reciprocating in its motion very much like the rock-drill—having its special sphere of usefulness in wet and heavy land. In any case a wide, gripping wheel is required in front to carry the machine forward and to turn it on reaching the end of the furrow. The wire-wound drum is actuated by a spring which tends to keep it constantly wound up, and when the plough has turned and is heading again towards the cable at the side of the field, this drum automatically winds up the wire. So also when each pair of furrows has been completed, the supply-wire is automatically shifted along upon the fixed cable to a position suitable for the next pair.

Not only in the working, but also in the manuring, of the soil the electric current will play an important part in the revolution in agriculture. The fixing of the nitrogen from the atmosphere in order to form nitrates available as manure depends, from the physical point of view, upon the creation of a sufficient heat to set fire to it. The economic bearings of this fact upon the future of agriculture, especially in its relation to wheat-growing, seemed so important to Sir William Crookes that he made the subject the principal topic of his Presidential Address before the British Association in 1898.