THE STORAGE OF WHEAT 203 



Storage of Wheat at the Local Market. The unit of accumu- 

 lation at the local market is the wagon load. The unit of rail- 

 way shipments is the car load. The shortest time that the 

 wheat can be stored at the local market, then, is until enough 

 of one grade has accumulated to fill a car, which may be only a 

 fraction of a day. For various reasons, grain may be stored 

 at the local markets for longer periods. When the buyer lacks 

 better facilities, the wheat is often transferred directly from 

 the wagon to the car by means of manual labor. By far the 

 most usual method, however, is by means of the elevator. 



The modern elevator is a very essential factor in our wheat 

 industry. Its chief functions are storage; cleaning, drying 

 and gathering wheat; and the vertical and horizontal transpor- 

 tation incident to these processes and to the processes of load- 

 ing and unloading from wagons, cars and ships. Steam or 

 electric power operating the machinery of the elevator ac- 

 complishes all this work without any aid from manual labor, 

 work that would require the manual labor of a vast army of 

 men to accomplish it. If it were thus performed, the operations 

 would be so slow and expensive that they would raise the cost 

 of producing wheat to such a height as to prohibit much of the 

 production now carried on. With one single exception, the 

 entire process of producing wheat flour, including the raising, 

 harvesting, threshing, shipping and milling of the wheat, may 

 be accomplished by machinery. It remains for some genius to 

 remove this exception by inventing a machine that can handle 

 the sack of wheat on the Pacific coast, and one that can handle 

 the sheaf of wheat in the Red river valley. It would seem that 

 neither task should be beyond the inventor's power. Of the 

 machinery used on a large wheat farm, the plow stands at one 

 end, and the elevator at the other. Human labor has been 

 minimized throughout all of the operations. All agricultural 

 implements are guided by levers; threshermen are only assist- 

 ants to a machine which delivers the grain into a sack or grain 

 tank; those who unload the wheat from the wagons simply 

 loose a bolt, and the grain is dumped; those who heave wheat 

 into bins merely press buttons; and those who load it into cars 

 or ships need but pull a lever. The elevator at the local market 

 often has its machinery so constructed that it can empty 1,000 

 bushels an hour from wagons, and some.times 10,000 bushels a 



