16 BULLETIN 1230, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
Obviously, two other factors and only two, need to be considered 
here: the differences in crops grown and the larger use of month 
hands in North Dakota. The Kansas farms studied had 81.7 per 
cent of their cultivated acreage in wheat; the North Dakota farms, 
59 per cent. The wheat concentration was much higher in Kansas. 
Oats, rye, and barley raised the North Dakota small-grain acreage 
to a figure approximating that of Kansas. But these grains do not 
all ripen when wheat is ripening. Haying is followed in North 
Dakota by the rye and early oats and a good deal of harvest work is 
put out of the way before “the big harvest” begins. Consequently, 
the harvest period in a central or western Kansas county tends to 
be more concentrated than the harvest of a North Dakota county. 
Spring planting and the succession of harvests, with some corn and 
potato cultivation, enables many of the Dakota farmers to employ 
month hands, who, with the farmer and his family, handle the 
haying and the early harvest and materially reduce the demand for 
haryest hands during the wheat harvest season. The differences in 
crops and the larger use of month hands made possible by the crop 
diversification therefore account in part for the ee intense demand 
for harvest hands in the Dakotas. 
The different machinery used, however, has a very important 
effect upon the harvest labor demand in the two areas. The header 
requires for its efficient use a crew of six men; when the grain is 
heavy, often seven. A farmer can get along with a smaller crew but 
does not get maximum utilization of his header. When grain is 
headed the standard practice requires one man to drive the header, 
two men to drive the barges (or wagons) which receive the heads, 
two men in the barges to distribute the heads properly in the barge 
and pitch them to the stack, and a stacker to stack the heads. 
Sometimes, on large farms, the grain is hauled directly from the 
header to the threshing machine. In this case the stacker is dis- 
pensed with, and a crew of five men do the harvesting, while a separate 
crew runs the threshing machine and hauls away the threshed grain. 
When threshing from the header the farmer requires more rather 
than less men during his harvest. He uses less labor in the total 
than if he had harvested and threshed separately but he needs it all 
at one time. 
A number of variations from the standard header practice have 
developed. ‘Tractors powerful enough to pull both the header and a 
barge enable some farmers to employ the header efficiently with a 
five-man crew. When the barge is loaded, the tractor stops a few 
moments while a team hauls the loaded barge to one side and hauls 
an empty barge into position to be coupled to the tractor. Then, 
while the second barge is being loaded, the team hauls the loaded 
barge to the stack to be emptied. Most farmers, however, use one 
man on the tractor and one man on the header, and use a six-man 
crew even when using such tractors. 
On some farms even larger tractors have been brought into service 
and important economies of labor cost achieved. In a typical case, a 
Kansas farmer used a large tractor to pull 2 headers and their barges, 
and employed therewith a crew of 8 men, instead of the crew of 12 
ordinarily used when 2 headers and 4 barges are in service. 
The ‘“‘stacker” barge is another device made possible by mechanical 
field power. A number of different styles have been invented in 
