Wall Street Goes a-Farming 



Raising crops on the factory plan 

 with four thousand hired men 



Bv John R. Colter 



Getting teamsters is a chronic aimculty on a farm. The "steel mule," or tractor solves this problem 

 for "big business." Above is shown one of these "mules" hauling pea vines to a threshing station 



WHEX Capital undertakes anything, 

 whether it be an exploitation of a 

 mine, a mill, a chain of grocery- 

 shops or a transportation project involving 

 a string of railroads — you expect scientific 

 treatment, efficient management, and a 

 certain daring grappling with problems 

 never before solved. In tackling its latest 

 important development job — the growing 

 of things in the- ground — Capital has not 

 gone about the work in any less thorough or 

 scientific manner. The gigantic Oak Or- 

 chard Farm, largest of muck-gardens in the 

 Eastern states and possibly in the whole 

 world, stands even to-day — when it is 

 scarcely two years old — as an admirable 

 example of what a great farm can be when 

 conducted under the precise and systematic 

 management of "Big Business." 



They call it the '"Wall Street" farm up in 

 Genesee County, New York, but it would 

 not blend with what is probably your con- 

 ception of a farm. You would have to tour 

 about in one of the farm's automobiles for 

 six or eight hours before you could get an 

 idea of it all. It is a vast tract. It is nine 

 miles by two miles, to speak roughly, for the 

 general contour is that of a pair of saddle- 

 bags. To pay off the men who work on the 

 huge outdoor hotbed the paymaster makes 

 a sixty-mile trip. Oak Orchard Farm has 

 its own telephone system, its own farm- 

 machinery repair shops, builds its own 

 roadways, counts its cattle on a dozen 

 sizeable hills, does its experimental seed- 

 planting on thirty-five-acre lots instead of 

 twenty-foot squares, swarms with labor- 



saving caterpillar-tractors and light steel 

 "mules" in place of horses, plants onions 

 and lettttce by the half-mile row- — and has 

 its own canneries, storage cellars, garages 

 and home-communities in the bargain. A 

 gigantic country-produce manufacturing 

 plant with a potential acreage of eleven 

 thousand — such is the self-sustaining under- 

 taking with which the New York capitalists 

 who'Own and operate the Oak Orchard 

 Valley bid fair to revolutionize the business 

 of farming. 



Dynamiting Ditches to Obtain 

 Muck Land 



Three years ago the great Oak Orchard 

 Valley which lies just north of Elba, N. Y. 

 (half in Genesee and half in Orleans 

 County), was a vast marsh, overgrown with 

 dense underbrush and studded with forests 

 of heavy timber. It was at once a lumber- 

 jack's job and a drainage engineer's job. 

 Through the center of the marsh a colony of 

 Adirondack lumbermen cut a path — they 

 were specially brought down for the occa- 

 sion. Behind them the engineers dyna- 

 mited and dredged a ditch which would 

 ultimately carry off the surplus water to 

 Lake Ontario, fifty miles away. Lateral 

 canals, feeders to the main ditch, were 

 gouged out at distances of approximately 

 two thousand feet. Thus the great bulk of 

 the surface waters of the region were 

 carried down the valley, leaving exposed 

 several thousand acres of hitherto sub- 

 merged muck-land — that superwealthy soil 

 which produces truck-stuffs with lavish 



