For the number and variety of useful implements increase so rapidly, while their usefulness is so palpable, that, though it is difficult to farm efficiently without many if not most of them, it is impossible that the young farmer of moderate means should buy and keep them all. True, he might hire when he needed, if what he wanted were always at hand; but this can only be assured by some such arrangement as I have suggested, wherein each undertakes to provide and keep that which he will most need; agreeing to lend it whenever it can be spared to any other member of the combination, who undertakes to minister in like manner to his need in return.
I think few will doubt that the inventions in aid of Agriculture during the last forty years will be far surpassed by those of the forty years just before us. The magnificent fortunes which, it is currently understood, have rewarded the inventors of the more popular Mowers, Reapers, etc., of our day, are sure to stimulate alike the ingenuity and the avarice of clever men throughout the coming years, and to call into existence ten thousand patents, whereof a hundred will be valuable, and ten or twelve eminently useful. Plowing land free from stumps and stones cannot long be the tedious, patience-trying process we have known it. The machinery which will at once pulverize the soil to a depth of two feet, fertilize and seed it, not requiring it to be trampled by the hoofs of animals employed in subsoiling and harrowing, will soon be in general use, especially on the spacious, deep, inviting prairies of the Great West.—But I must defer what I have to say of Steam and its uses in Agriculture to another chapter.
XLI.
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.