,9o6] LANDRETH— THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 169 



inches deep and perfectly level, every particle of soil cast back quite 

 three or four feet from its original location ; but the machinery was 

 not perfect ; no one at the time was ready to take it up ; consequently, 

 the engine was sold for another purpose and the chopping apparatus 

 went to the scrap pile. 



A photograph of the Bloomsdale steam chopper gives a partial 

 idea of the best steam chopper ever used, and I take great credit 

 that it was developed on my own farm. It was an ideal machine, 

 but perhaps more theoretical than practical. This was in the years 

 1887 and 1888. 



Since then there has been a great advance in methods of steam 

 plowing by direct traction, and that by the western people, always 

 leaders, if not in the invention, certainly in the adoption of all new 

 machines and appliances, and they have not been laggards in per- 

 fecting the American idea as connected with steam plowing, for it 

 has rested with a California establishment to most successfully pro- 

 mote the system of direct traction plowing. 



This establishment makes a sixty-horse power traction engine 

 which draws a gang of twenty-one earth-cutting disks, each cutting 

 a foot wide and nearly a foot deep and doing in this style fifty acres 

 a day, sometimes eighty acres. 



In England no double engine cable system has ever done any- 

 thing like this, and in addition the traction engine has sufficient 

 power to drag at the same time a gang of grain sowers which seeds 

 the same width of twenty-one feet. The engine makes its own elec- 

 tric light, so that operations can be conducted throughout the full 

 twenty-four hours. One of these machines is in use in South Africa. 



And there is another case of most remarkable development in 

 agricultural mechanism, my reference being to harvesting machines, 

 and this again by western people, who, by reason of their enormous 

 breadths of ground and scarcity of labor, have always been very 

 active in promoting the use of labor-saving machinery. 



Many farmers in Minnesota and the Dakotas have for years been 

 winning the admiration of the old east by using thirty and forty 

 improved reapers at one time in the same field, all attended by 

 traveling machine shops to effect repairs, but it has been left to a 



