24 BULLETIN 1020, IT. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



be remembered, however, that many transient harvest hands, prob- 

 ably at least two-thirds of them, work on several different farms, so 

 that 25,000 or 30,000 men no doubt can take care of the North Dakota 

 work. On the other hand, men are leaving the harvest fields every 

 day of the season, making it necessary for new men to take their 

 places. 



While it probably is correct to state that from 100,000 to 200,000 

 individuals find employment in the harvest, there is no basis for 

 saying that the demand for harvest labor reaches such large figures 

 on any one day. On the other hand, thousands of harvest hands re- 

 main to thrash where they have harvested, and the contemporaneous 

 demands of thrashing and harvesting increase the total demand for 

 labor during the last four or six weeks of the harvest far beyond 

 the harvest demand proper. Thousands of the men who take part 

 in the harvest in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri do not need to 

 go into the northern harvest, as they can find plenty of work thrash- 

 ing and cultivating corn in the winter-wheat area. Ordinarily, how- 

 ever, their places are more than filled by the thousands who enter 

 the northern harvest without having worked previously in Kansas. 



MOBILIZATION MACHINERY. 



Unquestionably the newspapers are the most important means by 

 which men are attracted to the harvest. They begin in May and 

 early June to publish statements of the prospective labor needs and 

 wage scales in the harvest area. Active advertising of harvest work 

 by employment agencies, public and private, also stimulates the flow 

 of men toward the grain fields. A third important influence which 

 arouses interest in the harvest in the minds of workmen is conversa- 

 tion with men who have been to the harvest. More than a million 

 individual wage earners in the United States have " made the har- 

 vest " one year or another, and many of them have found their 

 experience satisfactory. Scattered through the various industries, 

 on farms, in railroad and construction work, or in factories, these 

 men tell their companions about the harvest, often enlisting a 

 "buddy" to return with them. The harvest furnishes the theme 

 for many an animated discussion in the shanties of the lumber camp, 

 in the Chicago, Omaha, or Minneapolis lodging house, during the 

 factory lunch hour, or in the pool room. No one can foretell how 

 many men this sort of advertising will bring in any given year, 

 whence they will come, or when they will arrive. But each season 

 it recruits thousands. The railroads running through the grain 

 belt gather estimates of the crop conditions and prospective labor 

 demand in each locality from their local agents in that area, and are 

 thus able to make a reasonably accurate advance approximation of! 



