26 BULLETIN 1230, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
Less than one-fourth of the Oklahoma farmers visited and but 12 per 
cent of the Kansas farmers were threshing with their own machines. 
In central Nebraska the situation was entirely different. More 
machines were owned jointly by several neighboring farmers, who 
used them to thresh only their own farms, than was the case in any 
other part of the wheat belt. These Nebraska farmers have developed 
an interesting method of threshing. From three to six or seven of 
them buy a moderate size machine. One of the farmers acts as engi- 
neer, another as separator man, another as spike pitcher. The others 
with their hired men, sons, and daughters do the field or stack pitchin 
and drive the teams. The farmer whose grain is being threshe 
boards the crew while on his farm, and the wives of the cooperating 
farmers help the wife with the extra housework involved. Thus 
dependence upon transient labor is eliminated. 
The standard practice in the Nebraska counties when contract 
threshers are hired also differs from that in the Kansas counties. 
In Nebraska the farmer ordinarily hires a machine with a crew of 
but two or three men; that is, engineman, separator man, and per- 
haps a water man, and the remainder of the crew consists of neigh- 
bors trading work with the farmer whose grain is being threshed. 
The farmers of the neighborhood work from farm to farm, trading 
work, with a limited amount of money exchanging hands to balance 
accounts between individual farmérs where one gives more work 
than he gets. In Nebraska only 11 per cent of the farms hired 
machines with full crews, and these were mostly in Redwillow and 
Hitchcock Counties, where the conditions are the same as in north- 
western Kansas. 
The same practice obtained in Minnesota as in Nebraska and the 
reader will note in Table 5 that in Nebraska and Minnesota almost 
a third of the farmers owned in whole or in part the machines which 
threshed their farms. Approximately 60 per cent hired machines 
with 2 to 4-man crews and furnished the remainder of the crews 
themselves, and only about 10 per cent of the farmers hired machines 
which brought a full crew with them. The similarity between the 
conditions observed in these two States is not accidental. In both | 
States considerable progress has been made in the wheat growing 
counties toward crop diversification and the splitting up of the 
farms into smaller units and there is a larger population per square 
mile of rural territory than in most of the other portions of the 
wheat belt. 
The figures suggest that as the crop diversification now proceeding 
in the Dakotas and parts of Kansas and Oklahoma continues to de- 
velop, a larger and larger percentage of the threshing will be done 
by small machines owned by farmers using them and manned by 
the farmers of the neighborhood. Both in 1920 and 1921 the field 
Bue: found a widespread impression in the Dakotas among the 
armers and agricultural leaders, State and County, that the small 
machines were gradually changing the threshing situation in those 
States. 
These impressions were confirmed by several iniare in addition 
to the fact revealed in Table 5 that North Dakota already does a — 
large part of its threshing with machines owned on the farms where 
they are used: (1) Large threshing outfits were standing idle in 
many towns, and on inquiry concerning the reason of their idleness 
opt te atice enh ee ain in ad 
= 
— es 
PEt ee 8 ee PS or a 
ee 
ice 
AP 8 ay tpl L Rey GL te iat Pye Rt Dal és inline iter 4 
