14 BULLETIN 1230, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
farmer to complete his harvest in 6 or 8 days. He hasn’t enough 
ao to keep him busy longer, and the man on the somewhat 
ee farm can harvest twice as long instead of twice as fast, if he so 
esires. 
The 640-acre farmer, on the other hand, if he is cutting his crop 
with an equipment that requires him to harvest from 14 to 21 days 
inorder to get in his crop, is taking about all the time that nature 
allows him for the purpose.’ Those who have more grain than the 
640-acre farmer must put enough machinery and men into the 
field to get their work done about as quickly as he does his, or else 
their grain will begin to shatter and part of the crop be lost. Nature 
normally allows a maximum of three or four weeks’ time for the 
harvest, although prolonged hot weather may materially reduce that 
maximum period. The largest farms must be able to finish in that 
time. Good management requires the farmer to plan to do his work 
in considerably less time than the extreme limit set by nature. 
Otherwise unexpected delays, or weather that forces the ripening of 
the grain, may cause him to lose part of his crop. 
The significance of these facts interpreted m their effect upon the 
labor demand is threefold: (1) The big demand for harvest labor in a 
county is necessarily concentrated into a period of two to four weeks, 
generally two to three weeks; (2) the demand for labor varies directly 
with the size of the farms; (3) if a majority of the farms in a county 
are large farms the intensity of the demand in that county will be 
greater, especially when dry weather forces the crop and compels 
all of the farms to harvest at about the same time. 
Labor emergencies, in other words, are much less severe where 
farms are relatively small and the amount of labor resident in the 
locality is therefore larger. The individual farm can handle a much. 
larger proportion of its crop with the members of the family. The 
farmers of the neighborhood can cooperate and save each others’ 
crops. The labor of three or four farms, and the machinery and 
horses, can frequently bind and shock within one to five days the 
fields which ripen first, and get all of the farms out of the way before 
the grain begins to shatter. Three or four farms can be “‘cleaned up” 
in this way within the period nature permits to the harvest. 
Large farms, because the resident labor supply is entirely inade- 
quate to handle the several farms successively, can not rely on 
neighborhood cooperation and must depend upon using more 
machinery and more hired labor. The same wheat acreage, there- 
fore, may be handled with little or no hired labor when the farms 
average 240 to 320 acres in size, and may require a considerable 
number of harvest hands if grown on farms of 640 or 880 acres or 
larger. 
EFFECT OF DIFFERENT KINDS OF MACHINERY UPON LABOR DEMAND. 
Table III of the appendix shows the effects of the kind of machinery 
used in the harvest upon the amounts of labor used. Two strikin 
facts stand out in the table: (1) That the total amount of labor use 
6 Experiments conducted by the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Station to determine the advantag- 
eous period for cutting showed that within a two week’s Set the maximum number of bushels was ~ 
obtained on the eleventh and twelfth days of cutting and that subsequent to that date the yield began to 
decline. See ‘‘Wheatin Kansas.”’ Report, September, 1920, Kansas State Board of Agriculture, Topeka, 
Kans., pp. 169-170. 
