Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1894 — CALIFORNIA HARVEST SCENE. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

CALIFORNIA HARVEST SCENE.

A Machine That Cut*, Threehee, and Sack* the Uraln. The accompanying illustration ■hows a scene on a large California wheat ranch in harvest time. Many men not so very old can easily remember when the best known manner of harvesting wheat anywhere in the world was by means of the “cradle” swung from right to left by one man, who thus cut the grain and laid it in a continuous swath, whence it was raked up and bonnd in sheaves by the man who followed close behind the cradler with a wooden-toothed hand rake Two men thus equipped could cut and bind from two to five acres in one day, but to keep up the work for a week or two in succession withan average of three acres per day was called a good record. To be sure, the “cradle” was a vast advance over the sickle which preceded it, and which had been used in the harvest for thousands of years, but to the wheajt farmers of to-day both are as antlquatei as the ark of Noah. The machine here shown is the latest triumph In harvesting machinery known to the harvest fields of California. It is a marvel of power and efficiency and will no doubt long remain at or very near the head of the list. The great traction engine which moves the whole weighs twelve tons. It moves at a speed of three and a half miles per hour, cuts a swath twenty-five feet wide and harvests a hundred acres per day. It not only cuts the grain, but threshes it, sacks it and piles it in heaps of nine sacks each. Only eight men are required to do all this, and they work under the shade of an awning. The

cost of such a train of ponderous harvest machinery is $6,000; and it is cheaper, in proportion to its capabilities, than was the old-fashioned cradle at $5. To do the same amount of work by animal power would require at least fifty horses and also a great many more men. It will thus be seen that although the first cost of such a harvesting machine is greater, it is after all, the least expensive appliance that exists for harvesting large areas. To show the absolute necessity of such machinery in these days of enormous production of cereals, we have only to cite the fact that the farmers of the United States harvested last year 34,629,418 acres of wheat Of this immense acreage 2,620,490 acres were harvestfd in California, 2,768,092 in Kansas, 2,683,904 In Ohio, 2,523,362 in Indiana, 1,348,462 in Illinois, 3,197,363 in Minnesota, 2,414,281 In South Dakota and 2,753,980 in North Dakota. The entire wheat crop of the United States in 1893 was 396,131,725 bushels.

CALIFORNIA HARVEST SCENE.