24 BULLETIN 1020, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
be remembered, however, that many transient harvest hands, prob- 
ably at least two-thirds of them, work on several different farms, so 
that 25,000 or 30.000 men no doubt can take care of the North Dakota 
work. On the other hand, men are leaving the harvest fields every 
day of the season, making it necessary for new men to take their 
places. 
While it probably is correct to state that from 100,000 to 200,000 
individuals find employment in the harvest, there is no basis for 
saying that the demand for harvest labor reaches such large figures 
on any one day. On the other hand, thousands of harvest hands re- 
main to thrash where they have harvested, and the contemporaneous 
demands of thrashing and harvesting increase the total demand for 
labor during the last four or six weeks of the harvest far beyond 
the harvest demand proper. Thousands of the men who take part 
in the harvest in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri do not need to 
go into the northern harvest, as they can find plenty of work thrash- 
ing and cultivating corn in the winter-wheat area. Ordinarily, how- 
ever, their places are more than filled by the thousands who enter 
the northern harvest without having worked previously in Kansas. 
MOBILIZATION MACHINERY. 
Unquestionably the newspapers are the most important means by 
which men are attracted to the harvest. They begin in May and 
early June to publish statements of the prospective labor needs and 
wage scales in the harvest area. Active advertising of harvest work 
by employment agencies, public and private, also stimulates the flow 
of men toward the grain fields. A third important influence which 
arouses interest in the harvest in the minds of workmen is conversa- 
tion with men who have been to the harvest. More than a million 
individual wage earners in the United States have "made the har- 
vest" one year or another, and many of them have found their 
experience satisfactory. Scattered through the various industries, 
on farms, in railroad and construction work, or in factories, these 
men tell their companions about the harvest, often enlisting a 
"buddy" to return with them. The harvest furnishes the theme 
for many an animated discussion in the shanties of the lumber camp, 
in the Chicago, Omaha, or Minneapolis lodging house, during the 
factory lunch hour, or in the pool room. No one can foretell how 
many men this sort of advertising will bring in any given year, 
whence they will come, or when they will arrive. But each season 
it recruits thousands. The railroads running through the grain 
belt gather estimates of the crop conditions and prospective labor 
demand in each locality from their local agents in that area, and are 
thus able to make a reasonably accurate advance approximation of! 
