COST AND UTILIZATION OF POWER ON FARMS. 29 



cultivation than for any other work except corn harvest. Corn har- 

 vest, however, was usually spread over a greater length of time than 

 cultivation, and on most of the farms corn cultivation was the opera- 

 tion which required the greatest amount of horse labor in the shortest 

 time. 



Eighty-four of the 284 men who used horses for cultivating used 

 2-row cultivators for at least part of the work, and 22 of the 84 used 

 2-row implements exclusively. (See fig. 8.) 



On the average the daily duty of one horse on a 2-row cultivator 

 was about 25 per cent higher than the duty of one horse on a 1-row 

 implement, and if 2-row cultivators had been used exclusively the 

 amount of horse labor required for cultivating would have been 25 

 per cent less than if 1-row cultivators had been used exclusively. 



Fig. 9.— Horses only were used for mowing hay on these farms. 



Corn cultivating represented the peak of man labor as well as of 

 horse labor requirements on many of the farms, and since one man 

 with a 2-row cultivator accomplished nearly twice as much as one 

 man with a 1-row, the more extended use of the 2-row machine on 

 some of the farms where the acreage in corn was too great to be culti- 

 vated with a single 1-row implement would have made it possible to 

 reduce both the number of horses kept on the farm and the number of 

 men employed during the cultivating season. 



Haying. — Hay occupied only a small acreage on most of the farms 

 visited, and while the horses did 92 per cent of the total work on this 

 crop the amount of horse labor required for it was small compared 

 with the amount used in cultivating and harvesting corn and in 

 harvesting and thrashing grain. (See fig. 9.) 



Variations in practices on individual farms had considerable 

 effect on the amount of horse labor used. On some farms the hay 

 was loaded with a hay loader directly from the swath; on others it 



