36 BULLETIN 1230, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
Wages in Nebraska were both lower than those in Kansas and less 
standardized. In Redwillow and Hitchcock Counties, which are 
contiguous to northwestern Kansas, the $4 rate prevailed. In 
Thomas County, Kans., just across the State line, the farmers paid 
$5. A harvester who finished working in Thomas County and 
crossed over into a neighboring county in Nebraska had to accept 
a wage $1 a day lower. If he went eastward across southern Ne- 
braska, or came up out of central Kansas, where the $5 rate prevailed, 
and sought harvest work in central or northeastern Nebraska, he 
found almost half of the farms paying $3 or $3.50, and the remainder 
$4. Some were paying only $2.50. 
As he went on into South Dakota, the $4 wage almost disappeared. 
Over half of the farms visited in South Dakota paid $3 a day for 
harvest hands in 1921, nearly one-third paid $3.50. One in twelve 
paid $4 a day. In North Dakota the effort of the farmers to hold 
the wages to $3 or $3.50 per day continued. Of 228 farmers who 
furnished data, 41.2 per cent stated that they obtained their harvest 
hands in 1921 at $3 a day; 26.3 per cent at $3.50, and 28.9 per cent 
at $4 aday. Only 5 said that they paid $4.50 and only 3 that they 
paid $5. The wage distribution in Minnesota was almost identical 
with that in North Dakota, with the rate averaging a little lower 
in Minnesota. 
The reasons for these wide variations in harvest wage rates have 
been discussed in detail in a previous publication. Kssentially, 
the wage fluctuation from State to State and from one section of a 
State to another is due to changes in the ratio of labor supply to 
demand on the one hand, and to distances from the sources of labor 
supply on the other. 
The conditions which make the Kansas “header harvest’’ par- 
ticularly dependent upon the transient harvest hand have already 
been described. The effect of this dependence upon the harvest 
wage is accentuated by the fact that the “big harvest’’ begins in 
Kansas. The task of attracting labor from other States to the 
harvest falls with particular weight upon Kansas. It is the Kansas 
opportunity and the Kansas wage which must be used to attract 
industrial labor from the cities, the oil fields, construction work, and 
the farms of lowa, Arkansas, and Missouri. Consequently Kansas 
must offer wages high enough to lure labor to the harvest; and she 
must lure the labor or lose much of her crop. Naturally the por- 
tions of Kansas farthest from Kansas City must pay the highest 
wages to make it worth a harvester’s while to go to them, and the 
wages in eastern Kansas are lower than those in western Kansas. 
nce in Kansas, many of the harvest hands are certain to move on 
into Nebraska and the Dakotas. Meanwhile other laborers, coming 
out of Omaha, Des Moines, Sioux City, Chicago, Minneapolis, Duluth, 
Butte, and hundreds of other towns, go directly into the northern 
harvest. Two streams of labor supply are therefore attracted into 
the northern harvest, and the relation of demand to supply is altered. 
The binder harvest is not as dependent as the header hares upon 
transient labor, and the supply is larger in proportion to the demand. 
The situation is generally “easier”? from ihe favniete yoint of view; 
more acute from the harvest hands’ point of view in Nebraska and 
South Dakota than in North Dakota. Hence the annual cycle of 
21 Harvest Labor Problems in the Wheat Belt, op. cit., pages 5-12 and 30-35. 
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