170 LANDRETH— THE NEW AGRICULTURE. [May 4 



Californian to devise a perfectly practical machine for cutting, 

 threshing, cleaning and sacking all at one operation, the grain being 

 made ready for market five minutes after the machine touches the 

 field. 



This machines requires the united power of thirty to forty horses, 

 still better that of a traction engine, which by its electric light turns 

 night into day. The machine will take care of five acres an hour or 

 over one hundred acres in the twenty-four hours. These machines 

 are used in California, Washington and Oregon, districts where the 

 grain thoroughly matures on the stalk and where no rain occurs 

 during the harvest season. The outfit costs $8,500, and one farmer 

 in Spain has had nerve enough to purchase the full system. 



And what other remarkable advances in farm implements, few 

 of them as impressive as the steam plow or the combined harvester, 

 but in their places equally as important. It would be too compre- 

 hensive a subject to endeavor to refer to them all, but as examples 

 will name the corn stalk cutter and binder which handles a crop 

 of corn much as a grain binder handles wheat or rye, or the corn 

 husker which handles a standing crop of corn, assorting all stalks 

 and husking the ears. 



These mechaines are of special importance, for be it remembered, 

 there is annually grown in the United States two acres of corn to 

 every man, woman or child. 



A later development of " the new agriculture," but not a novelty 

 in practice, is the process of spraying or washing the stems and 

 foliage of plants with liquids containing poisons for the destruction 

 of insect life. This was introduced about 1870, and was at once 

 found very practical in checking the ravages of many kinds of in- 

 sects ; but countrymen noted that there were certain other insects 

 which were not killed ; they observed some which seem to delight in 

 a poison bath, some which put on the top surface of an open barrel 

 of paris green seem to be more lively in the morning than they were 

 the night before. This, brought to the attention of entomologists, 

 elicited the information that there were two great classifications 

 among insects which must be recognized by the farmer. Firstly, 

 those which ate the tissues of plants, and, consequently, took into 



