12 BULLETIN 1230, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
and late in the evening. A perennial lack of adequate harvest labor 
supply in this area has trained the farmers to push their harvest as 
rapidly as possible. The distance to Thomas County from the 
centers of labor supply and the fact that harvest hands, when they 
have finished there, must either go back to the eastern borders of 
Kansas and Nebraska in order to go into the Dakotas, or go to the 
West through Colorado, has for years discouraged harvest hands 
from going into the extreme northwestern corner of Kansas. It is a 
long trip, expensive both m time and money, and once there it is 
not possible for the harvest hands to go directly north into South 
Dakota. They must detour through Colorado or back to Omaha or 
Sioux City to go north and the detour must be made through several 
hundred miles of territory in which work can not be obtained. 
And while these harvest hands have been working in the Thomas 
County area, other harvest hands who did not go into northwestern 
Kansas to help complete the last portion of the winter wheat harvest, 
eo north into the Dakotas. When the harvester who has ‘“‘made the 
Colby country”’ finally reaches the spring wheat area he finds it very 
difficult to obtain employment. Thousands of harvesters have pre- 
ceded him. Thomas County and the neighboring Nebraska counties 
have, therefore, had to adapt their harvest policies to chronic labor 
shortage. Because of the distance from Colby, this shortage is even 
more acute in the Nebraska counties than in Thomas County. Conse- 
quently, as Table 1 shows, Redwillow and Hitchcock Counties, in 
which the wheat acreage per farm is hardly more than half of that of 
Thomas County, have met the situation by doing without harvest 
hands. They have diversified their crops, cut down their small 
grain acreage, and relied upon family labor and cooperation between 
neighbors to accomplish the harvest. 
The variations in amounts of labor used in the different counties in 
the remainder of Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota are largely 
to be explained in terms of variations in the amount of small grain 
acreage per farm and of variations in the amount of crop diversifica- 
tion. All of the area under discussion is harvésted with binders. 
A few headers are used in northern South Dakota (see Table III of 
the appendix), but not enough to affect the total demand for labor. 
In eight counties in Nebraska and two in South Dakota the average 
number of acres of small grain per farm ranged from 44 to 97 acres. 
In these counties the amount of labor on the farms at harvest time 
was very large in proportion to the small grain acreage—from 2.45 to 
4.72 men per 100 acres of small grain. The reason, of course, was 
that more than half of the labor was employed at other farm work. 
The other 30 counties which cut with binders raised a large acreage 
of small grain, ranging from an average of 125 acres per farm to 468 
acres. The average duration of the harvest in these counties ranged 
from 7.3 days to 14.7 days. In 28 of these counties the average 
harvest period was from 10 to 14 days. The number of acres cut 
per day increased steadily with the increase in small grain acreage 
while there was no corresponding increase in the duration of the 
harvest. arms with less than 200 acres of grain harvested from 12 
to 19 acres per day; those with between 200 and 300 acres harvested 
from 17 to 29 acres; farms with over 300 acres averaged a harvest 
of from 23 to 35 acres per day. More men and machines were put 
into the fields instead oh egeoiiaag the harvest over a longer period. 
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