Cooperative Woek with Columbia University 485 



tation and refrigerator cars, the West could put its products into 

 the eastern markets cheaper than the eastern growers could produce 

 them. All these things had a tendency toward increasing land 

 values in the West and decreasing them in the East. 



Some idea of the elfect of the influence of improved machinery 

 in all these matters, especially with reference to labor and the 

 production of certain crops, may be obtained when it is known 

 that, whereas thirty-five or forty years ago it took twenty minutes 

 for one man to shuck a bushel of corn and about 102 minutes to 

 take the fodder to the barn and cut it for stock feed, the same work 

 can now be done in 17% minutes. While it took 160 minutes for 

 a man to shell a bushel of com, the same work is now done by 

 means of steam shellers in 1% minutes. It formerly took on an 

 average of 160 minutes to cut, shock, and thresh a bushel of wheat. 

 All this work is now done in less than 4 minutes. 



These great improvements in farm machinery enable the aver- 

 age farmer to cultivate much larger areas than he was formerly 

 able to do. This is particularly true in the level country of the 

 Middle West, where conditions are much more favorable for the 

 use of machinery than in the more hilly and rocky regions of the 

 East. The small farms of the East, therefore, were not in a 

 position to compete with the larger farms and richer soils of the 

 West. 



Perhaps a more definite understanding of the profound changes 

 that took place in all these matters may be brought out by indi- 

 cating just what has happened in one of our leading eastern coun- 

 ties in Pennsylvania, which has recently been surveyed by the 

 Department of Agriculture at Washington, This survey and the 

 accompanying study show the very rapid and unusual changes that 

 have taken place in this region, making it necessary almost com- 

 pletely to redirect and reorganize the methods of farming. This 

 is typical of nearly all the eastern sections, including the farming 

 regions of Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England states. 



In 1840 there were in this particular county 16,000 dairy 

 cows, 45,000 other cattle, 45,000 swine, and 56,700 sheep. There 

 was produced 438,000 bushels of wheat, something over 9,000 

 bushels of oats, 86,000 bushels of rye, 826,000 bushels of corn, 

 and 78,000 tons of hay. 



