1 Sepr., 1902.] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 137 
Grain Elevators. 
[Wire over Frery Orrernan Innusrrarrons. | 
By N. A. COBB. 
(From the Agricultural Gazette of New South Wales.) 
Nore.—The writer’s object in the following pages has been to collect together and augment his 
previous articles on the subject of elevators, and explain fully to those who do not yet 
understand them the simple principles of the elevator system. 
When I see a farmer go to his nearest market town, several miles distant, 
ay 5d, each for bags by the wagon-load, take them home, and put them away 
in a dry place until wanted, then once more carry them out to the field, fill 
them with grain, sew them up, and, if he is a careful man, label each bag 
separately, lift the bags of wheat on to a high dray, take them to his barn, 
unload them, stack them, and then later on lift them down again, rip them 
open, clean the grain by machinery, bag it up again, label the bags again, and 
stack them once more until such time as the market price suits him; when I 
see him, having made a sale, unstacking them once more seve, | weeks later, 
sewing up the holes the mice haye gnawed meanwhile, lifting the n again on to 
his high dray, and off again, one by one, at the railway shed; when I see the 
grain leaking out through bursted, torn, and gnawed bags all the way from the 
railway-shed to the seaboard; when I see bags of precious grain, representing 
the income of farmers in all parts of the country, standing days at a time 
exposed to the wet weather and losing value— simply because grain in bags 
- cannot be handled fast enough to prevent a glut at the metropolitan or other 
central market; when I see valuable property, such as railway trucks, standing 
idle day by day, letting interest on the people’s money go to waste, because 
these trucks cannot be loaded with bags of wheat quickly and despatched to 
their destination ; when I see thousands of bushels of uncovered bags of wheat 
caught in a shower; when I see the wheat, after several hundred miles’ railway 
journey, unbagged and put into fresh bags before transhipping, because the 
original bags are worn out; when | see them again lifted, and lifted, and lifted 
slowly into the ship’s hold; finally, when I lean back with a shudder and try 
to imagine the high old time the ship’s rats and the weevils have among this 
honeycomb of bags of wheat—a picnic lasting, it may be, several months—until 
the grain is at last unloaded in London and shot into an elevator—when I see 
all these things I cannot find words powerful enough to stigmatise this universal 
use of bags. Because this thing is wrong in principle, and can be remedied. 
The secret of the remedy—no, it’s no secret; it is fairly written against 
the sky in scores of the greatest and most prosperous towns in America and 
Europe. Not the secret, then, but the principle of the remedy is this: 
threshed grain can, in a large measure, be handled like water. It will run, it 
can be poured, it can be pumped; and if only our farmers, merchants, and 
railway architects will take pains to consider this simple idea, the result will be 
a change in our methods of handling grain, beginning in the field and ending at 
the mill. ; 
What would you think of a man who lifted all the water out of his well in 
a bucket instead of with a pump? What would you think of a man who lifted 
all the water out over the edge of a tank instead of letting it run out through 
the faucet at the bottom? What would you think of a man who habitually 
carried water downhill instead of letting it runthroughaspout! What would 
you think of a man who, having 400 gallons of water to transport, put it into 
400 one-gallon receptacles instead of into one 400-gallon tank? What would 
you think of a man who caught his roof-water in an underground tank, so as to 
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