"7^ St«^ o^ ^'ta«*HC»%tc 



He brought several bushels of seed back to Illinois 

 and he and the neighbors planted it. The brush 

 found a ready sale to some factories just opened in 

 Chicago and the next few years saw a great in- 

 crease in acreage because the soil and climate of 

 Central Illinois produced the best brush known. Its 

 acreage spread every direction from Areola but 

 mostly to the south. 



Vision of fame and fortune in central Illinois 

 were soon dimmed by the fact of limited demand 

 and the headache of production. Soon it was found 

 out that domestic and export demand could use only 

 50,000 ton per year, regardless of quality or price, 

 and this amount holds true even to the present day 

 despite the increase in population. 



Machinery has made almost no headway in 

 the harvesting of the crop although in the manu- 

 facture of brooms it has gone ahead considerably. 

 Never has there been a machine made to take the 

 place of hand labor in cutting, bunching, drying 

 and bailing this crop, although thousands of dol- 

 lars have been spent trying. One of the reasons, of 

 course, is the limited prospective sales of such a 

 machine or machines. 



Broomcorn is planted in the same type of 

 ground with the same equipment as Indian corn or 



sorghum cane. A bushel of seed will plant about 

 18 acres. It looks not unlike these plants in its 

 growth. The tassel — the only pai't used — towers 

 above the ground from eight to twelve feet and 

 lucky is the man whose field grows to its maturity 

 without a tangled mess here and there. The tang- 

 ling of stalks involves a great deal of extra hand 

 work at harvest time. It takes 90 days, more or 

 less, to mature a crop and it will mature on less 

 moisture than Indian corn and will stand lots of wet 

 weather if not too late in its growth. The tedious 

 manual labor of harvesting usually begins in Sep- 

 tember. 



Walking backwards down the row, a man breaks 

 the stalks first from one row and then another, lay- 

 ing each row on the opposite side forming a "table" 

 three feet high with the "tassels" or brush extend- 

 ing to the edge or near it. The cutting is done with 

 a thick-bladed, large size knife and is done in such 

 a way as to remove the head but to leave the boot 

 or sheaf or blade on the stalk. A handful at a 

 time cut and laid on the "table" awaits a team to 

 haul it to the house for seeding and shedding. Seed- 

 ing is done now by belt feeding and passing brush 

 end through a twin revolving cylinder whose teeth 

 knock the seeds from the brush. Then the brush 



PAGE FOUR 



