234 



Popular Science Monthly 



bCALE IN MILES 



2 3 4 5 ^-^ 



'SOUTH BYRON 



You would have to tour about in an automobile for six or eight hours before you could get any 

 idea of this farm. It is a vast tract nine by two miles and like a pair of saddle-bags in contour 



fertility. Over sixty miles of drainage 

 canals, criss-crossing the immense farm, 

 have been constructed, so that to-day the 

 muck region stretches for miles in every 

 direction. In certain parts of the valley 

 the reclamation work was accomplished in 

 what is undoubtedly record time. One 

 large patch, which in the Autumn of 1913 

 was practically a lake bristling with heavy 

 trees, was transformed in nine months into 

 a harrowed field, ready for planting. 

 Drained of water, stripped of woods, 

 ploughed, harrowed — and a lettuce crop 

 harvested within the following three 

 months — that is a record of engineer- 

 ing and agricultural achievement which 

 corporate farming may well boast of 

 for a representative twelve-month's work. 

 The Factory 

 Idea Applied 

 to Farming 

 But in the 

 layout and 

 management of 

 the huge green- 

 stuffs factory — 

 that is precisely 

 what they are 

 making of Oak 

 Orchard Farm 

 — lie its most 

 interesting 

 phases. Every 

 hundred -acre 

 plot of soil re- 

 ceives careful 

 planning with 

 regard to its 



The dwelling in the home communities as planned by 

 the farm officials is not at all the ordinary type of 

 farmhouse ; but is compact, cozy and attractive 



tillage, planting, cultivation and harvesting. 

 The light and heavy tractors, employed 

 instead of horses, do their work under gangs 

 of men. There are plough-foremen, and 

 harvesting staffs on Oak Orchard farm, and 

 they report to their immediate superior 

 official just the same as a city factory sub- 

 chief would do. Each unit of the intricate 

 farm machinery with which the big hotbed 

 swarms receives credit for every yard of 

 work that it does. Each acre, under a cost- 

 accounting system, as effective as it is 

 unique on farms, is debited on the farm 

 auditor's book with its daily share of man- 

 labor, horse-labor, machine-labor, ferti- 

 lizer and its share, too, of the overhead 

 expense. There is nothing inexact about 

 the big farm's,^ methods ; it proposes 



to know just 

 where it stands 

 after the crops 

 have been har- 

 vested and 

 sold. 



Efficiency, 

 e specially 

 wherever the 

 precious muck- 

 soil is involved, 

 is the by-word 

 in operating the 

 farm. For in- 

 stance, the an- 

 cient rail-fences 

 which marked 

 boundaries- 

 have been 

 completely 



