The Romance of the Reaper

by Herbert Newton Casson

France must have our harvesters because she has been short of men since the wars of Napoleon. She has half a million soldiers and nine-tenths of a million officials. Even now, with harvesters clicking merrily in all their largest grain-fields, she and Germany cannot feed themselves. Spain at one time exported wheat, but at present is buying 10,000,000 bushels a year. England grows less than a quarter as much as will feed her people. And Russia would be famine-swept from end to end, in spite of her 30,000,000 farmers and her illimitable acres, if she had to depend wholly upon the sickle and the scythe.

But the story is by no means ended with Europe. To-day the sun never sets and the season never closes for American harvesters. They are reaping the fields of Argentina in January, Upper Egypt in February, East India in March, Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in June, Iowa in July, Canada in August, Sweden in September, Norway in October, South Africa in November, and Burma in December. It is always harvest somewhere. The ripple of the ripened grain goes round the world and the American harvester follows it.

Even from this incomplete list one may begin to understand how tremendous is the task that the International Harvester Company has assumed in undertaking to cater to the farmers of fifty countries—to adapt itself to their various customs.

In Holland, for instance, where the grass is short and thick, a mower must cut as close as a barber’s clippers; and in Denmark, where moss grows under the grass, it must cut so high as to leave the moss untouched. The careful Germans of Wisconsin will buy a light harvester, such as the “Milwaukee”; but in Argentina a light machine would be racked into junk in a season. The Argentinians, having raised cattle for generations, rush to the harvest in cowboy fashion. It is the joy of their lives to hitch six or eight horses to a big “header,” crack the long whip, and dash at full gallop over the rough ground.

There are small horses in Russia, big ones in France, oxen in India, and camels in Siberia, and the harvesters must be adapted to each. Certain backward countries demand a reaper without a reel. Australia must have a monster machine called a “stripper,” which combs off the heads of the grain. California and Argentina, because of their dry climate, can use “headers,” a combination of reaper and thrashing-machine. And so the American harvester has become a citizen of the world, adopting the national dress of each country.

The men who are dealing hand to hand with these problems are no longer the Reaper Kings, personally introducing their harvesters through royalty and nobility. These have been succeeded by an army of fifteen hundred American harvester experts. They are all salaried, most of them by the “International”; and their work is to put the farmers of the world to school. They are the teachers of a stupendous kindergarten. As an example of the rapidity with which they are sometimes able to teach, take the Philippines. Nine years ago the Filipinos spent nothing whatever for farming machinery; in 1905 they bought $90,000 worth. Even yet, however, they do not raise enough rice to feed themselves; and although half of them are farmers, only one-twentieth of their land is cultivated.

BISMARCK HAVING HIS FIRST VIEW OF AN AMERICAN SELF-BINDER

“Many of our agents are now living in Siberia with their families,” said C. S. Funk, the General Manager of the International. “They are teaching the mujiks to grow wheat and harvest it. We have similar missionaries in South Africa and South America and most of the countries of the world. Some of them have gone as far as water and rail would carry them, and have then crossed the mountains with their machinery on the backs of mules, so that they might teach the natives how to farm on the American plan. All told, we have more than a thousand such missionaries in foreign countries.”

In Chicago, I met two of the leaders who are in control of this army of teachers. One was a strong-faced young Illinoisan named Couchman, who handles several nations from Hamburg; and the other was a courteous commercial diplomat named La Porte, who supervises France, Spain, Italy, and Northern Africa from his office in Paris. Each is in charge of several hundred American mechanics, who are exiled from home for the sake of our harvester trade.