Such was the work done during the first three days that George spent on the farm. He saw the old-fashioned hand work and the modern use of labor-saving machinery. Then he studied his books. In them he found that the hand labor of cutting, drying, and housing the hay used to cost about five dollars a ton, and that now, with the best of modern machines, it need cost not more than one dollar a ton. This machinery is of great value to the farmer and also to those who buy the hay; for the farmer can sell his hay at a lower price, since it costs him less to make it.
This was the last of the haying. For several weeks George watched the hoes and the harrows, as they kept the gardens and fields in good condition. Then came harvest-time. Potatoes were first in George's thoughts, and when he learned that they were to be dug on the morrow he was thoroughly aroused. But he met with a sore disappointment. The potatoes were not dug by machinery. The common hoe or the specially shaped potato hoe were the only tools. Then the back-aching work of picking up potatoes added to his disgust, and he declared that he never would raise many potatoes. He learned that plows sometimes help the hoes, but that potato-digging machines have never come into general use, though good ones have been invented.
At last grain harvest-time came. This was the time to which George had long looked forward. Now he could see the wheat cut and threshed. This he was sure was the best work of the farmer. But when he saw Tom take the short, crooked sickle, cut some grain with that, gather it in his arms, and tie a cord around it, he could scarcely control himself. "Is that the way grain is harvested?" he said. Then when he saw the grain laid on the barn floor and struck rapidly by flails in the hands of two men, he declared, "If that is what the farmer has to do to get a little grain, then I do not want to be a farmer."
"Well," said Mr. Miller, "that is just what all farmers had to do until within fifty years."
A REAPER AND BINDER.
But George soon saw a different method. This first hand-work had been merely to harvest a small amount of early grain; a few days later the machines were brought out. Now George was happy. At last he saw a reaping machine and a combined reaper and binder. This interested him the most. He watched the machine as the horses drew it along the edge of the standing grain. He saw the grain cut and laid upon a platform, carried up into the machine, taken by two arms called packers, gathered by them into bundles, bound by cords and thrown to the ground. What more could be asked of any machine?
And yet there is a new type of harvester that has been used in San Joaquin valley, California. It cuts a swarth fifty-two feet in width. It not only cuts the grain but it threshes it as well. It makes the sacks and fills them as it travels over the field. It is said to cut an area of a hundred acres a day, and at the same time thresh the grain and fill fifteen hundred sacks.