18 AGEICULTUEE AND EURAL-LIFE DAY. 



With all the improvements in plows and in mechanical seeders, 

 their efficiency was limited by the fact that the crops had to be reaped 

 by hand, and that, too, within a space of 10 to 15 days. Hence the 

 hand labor necessary to one part of harvesting was limiting the 

 amount of work wdiich man's mechanical helpers could do for him 

 in all the other parts of the cropping process. Inventors put their 

 minds to work; British devices were improved by Americans, till to- 

 day we have the harvester, which reaps the grain, thrashes it, and 

 binds it into sheaves, doing all its work automatically. The amount 

 of labor saved by this machine is enormous. 



If we had to harvest our wheat by hand, it would take half the 

 men of the nation for that crop alone. Five men, with this reaper, 

 can now do as much as 100 men with scythes. The reaper enables 

 us to raise more wheat than Russia, whose population is larger than 

 ours; and at the same time we can maintain a larger proportion of 

 people in the cities than Russia can. It is the harvester which has 

 made the difference. 



So, with the improved plow, the harvester, and the other modern 

 agricultural machinery, the amount of labor required to raise a 

 bushel of wheat has been shortened from 3 hours to 10 minutes. The 

 men no longer needed on the farms are employed in our factories 

 and mines, making us as great a nation commercially as v/e are agri- 

 culturally. And so it is that improved farm machinery is one very 

 important cause of our industrial supremacy. 



WHAT AMERICAN INVENTORS HAVE DONE FOR THE FARMER. 



In the days when all work about the farm was performed by hand 

 labor and hand tools, 90 per cent of the people had to live on the 

 soil, for not more than 1 man out of 10 could be spared from the work 

 of raising food. Nowadays, six men, with enough land and all 

 modern appliances, can raise enough food to maintain a thousand 

 people. It is the glory of America that nearly all the modern ap- 

 pliances making this result possible were the inventions of 

 Americans. 



First of all, an American preserved for the world an entire staple 

 crop, together with the industry dependent upon it. This inventor 

 was Eli Whitney (1765-1825), who produced the gin by which cot- 

 ton is cleaned of its seeds. At the time Whitney perfected this ma- 

 chine cotton planting was dying out, owing to the fact that it had 

 to be cleaned by hand, and as one man could pick the seeds from 

 only about a pound a day, the labor made its cost prohibitive. 



