DEMAND FOR HARVEST LABOR IN THE WHEAT BELT. 27 
the reply was made, “It doesn’t pay to run them any more. 
You can’t get a large enough run to pay to operate.”’ (2) Threshing 
hands who have worked in the Dakotas for many seasons are almost 
universally complaining, “It doesn’t pay to come to the threshing 
any more. You can’t get a long enough run. There are so many 
machines in the State now that each machine has only.a short run. 
The farmers who own their own machines get their work done in a 
couple of weeks. We used to get runs of six and eight weeks.’’® 
(3) The fact is shown in Table 5 that in this spring-wheat territory 
nearly one-third of the farms were being threshed by machines 
owned by the farmer. Half of these machines, or 13.6 per cent, 
of all machines visited, threshed only the farms of the owner or 
owners of the machine. A large number of these farms were com- 
aratively small, less than a section in size. (4) Practically one- 
ourth of all of the threshing machines visited were less than 32-inch 
machines. } 
In the whole spring-wheat area (Table 5) the farmer provides the 
crew more frequently than in Oklahoma and Kansas. In a large 
percentage of cases the crew provided by the farmer in the Dakotas 
and Minnesota consists principally of neighbormg farmers trading 
work or hired by the day. For instance, in a day’s trip southwest 
of Fargo, N. Dak., in which over 30 farms were visited, all but 2 
were threshing with crews composed of local farmers. The oppor- 
tunities of employment for transient harvest and threshing hands 
pupea to be declining. Work trading makes the farmer independent 
of the transient labor supply, it decreases the cash outlay of the 
farmer in getting his crop in and threshed, and it puts the money 
paid out for threshing labor into the hands of the local farmers, 
thereby increasing the prosperity and financial strength of the local 
community. In Kansas, on the other hand, the transient threshing 
hand is still an important factor in the situation. 
Another interesting fact revealed by the table is that the Dakotas 
were the only part of the wheat belt in which threshing outfits 
brought cook cars with them and boarded their own crews. In 
Oklahoma two farmers reported that they had contracted with a 
threshing outfit that would board its own men, but no reference to 
such outfits was made in Kansas or Nebraska. In the Dakotas, 
however, 85 farms reported that the threshers they had engaged 
would board their threshing crews themselves and that the farmers 
would simply pay an agreed price per bushel for the threshed grain 
and the thresher “take care of everything.” Figures 7 and 8 show 
the bunk and cook cars of such a threshing outfit in Grand Forks 
County, N. Dak. 
Data on the number of farms threshed per threshing outfit were 
obtained for 115 outfits, 98 of which did contract threshing. Ten 
of the outfits were owned by two or more farmers jointly. It was 
found that three-fourths of the 115 machines threshed from 1 to 8 
farms each, 4 to 8 farms being the most common season’s work. 
Only 22 reported doing more than 8 farms, and only 6, more than 
12 farms. | 
Extremely small and extremely large machines were almost equally 
common. Most of the machines had 28 to 40 inch feed boards, the 
18 This quotation is an almost verbatim report of statements made by at least 500 harvest hands inter- 
viewed in 1920 and 1921. 
