THE FOOD CRISIS AND AMERICANISM 129 



tating eight or nine men, and for these, ten acres was 

 considered a good day's work. 



To-day only one man is needed to drive and operate 

 the harvester. This machine not only reaps the grain, 

 binds it into bundles, but leaves the bundles in piles, 

 so that there is only one man needed to set them into 

 shock. For these two men, twelve to fourteen acres 

 is considered a fair day's work, so that these two men 

 to-day are doing more and better work in the harvest 

 field, than nine could possibly do with the implements 

 in use forty years ago. 



In no other department of farm work has labor- 

 saving implements reduced the man-power to one-half 

 the extent as in the harvesting of small grain. 



The appalling fact is that because of the lack of 

 labor from the first day of seeding time to the ripen- 

 ing of the harvest, the grain yield has been reduced to 

 less than 50 per cent, of what it could and would have 

 been, with an adequate supply of efficient farm labor. 



As the laggard in the race makes as strenuous an 

 effort to pass the pole and avoid being " distanced " as 

 the leader does to get under the wire and win, so, fran- 

 tic with fear lest the little he has be lost, the farmer 

 cries out for help at the harvest time. This appeal is 

 pitiful. It is the cry of " that spent runner who al- 

 most won the race." 



Of all erroneous notions concerning agriculture, 

 there is none more widespread and generally accepted 

 than the idea that brute strength and animal instinct 

 are all that are necessary in a farm laborer; that 

 neither experience nor intelligence is required. 



