“painted harvesters, fleet after fleet,
Like yachts, career through seas of waving wheat.”
“My first experience with the ‘New Farmer,’ as you call him, was in Texas,” said a Kansas City business man. “I had taken an agency for harvesters in a section of Texas that was bigger than several dozen Vermonts, and I made my headquarters in a town called Amarillo. The first morning I went into the bank to get acquainted. While I was there in came a big, roughly dressed man. ‘Come here, Bill,’ said the banker. ‘Maybe you want some farm machinery.’
“‘Maybe I do,’ said the big fellow; so I gave him a catalogue and went on talking with the banker.
“Ten minutes later the big fellow looked up from the catalogue and asked—‘How much do you want for ten of these binders?’ I nearly had a spell of heart failure, but I gasped the price. He said—‘all right; send ’em along.’
“‘Don’t you worry about Bill’s credit,’ said the banker, seeing I looked dazed. ‘He has more than $100,000 in this bank right now.’
“This was my cue to get busy with the big farmer, and before he left the bank he had bought a thresher, four traction engines and half a dozen ploughs.”
Harvesting by machinery has actually become cheaper than the ancient method of harvesting by slaves. This surprising fact was first brought to the notice of Europeans during the Chicago World’s Fair, when forty-seven foreign Commissioners were taken to the immense Dalrymple farm in North Dakota. Here they saw a wheat-field very nearly a hundred square miles in extent, with three hundred self-binders clicking out the music of the harvest. There were no serfs—no drudges—no barefooted women. And yet they were told that the labour-cost of reaping the wheat was LESS THAN A CENT A BUSHEL.
It has now become impossible to reap the world’s wheat by hand. As well might we try to carry coal from mines to factories in baskets. Merely to have gathered in our own cereal and hay of last year’s growing, would have been a ten days’ job for every man and woman in the United States, between the ages of twenty and twenty-six. But even if it had been possible to return to hand-labour, in the production of the world’s wheat, the extra cost would have swollen, last year, to a total of $330,000,000—so I am told by a Wisconsin professor who has made a careful study of the costs of harvesting. This amount is more than equal to the entire revenue of the International Harvester Company, in the five years of its existence.
Roughly speaking, the time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been reduced from sixty-one hours to three, by the use of machinery. Hay now requires four hours, instead of twenty-one; oats seven hours, instead of sixty-six; and potatoes thirty-eight hours, instead of one hundred and nine.
It is machinery that has so vastly increased the size of the average American farm. In India, where a farmer’s whole outfit can be bought for ten dollars, the average farm is half an acre or less. In France and Germany it is five acres. In England it is nine. But in the United States—the home of farm machinery, it is one hundred and fifty acres.