Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1902 — A GREAT KANSAS FARM [ARTICLE]

A GREAT KANSAS FARM

®ne Man Divecta Cultivation on Forty Thousand Acres* The agriculturist who carefully cultivates forty or sixty or eighty acres and Calls It a farm is likely to look upon a “quarter section”—the regulation homestead of 160 acres—as a large estate; an entire section (a mile square) he would doubtless regard as a tremendous area, and a half dozen sections would secin like a whole province. What would such a man think of a farm on which from 100 to 150 men are employed; a farm whose furthest corner is seventeen miles from the farmhouse; a farm that requires three bookkeepers and stenographers to make a record of its activity? That is the scale on which M. M. Sherman conducts his farm in Central Kansas. He has more than 40,000 acres. Every year he sells more than 2,500 fat beeves. If a man were to start to ride around his farm on horseback, following the fence line and riding fifty miles a day, he could not make its circuit in two days. Mr. Sherman Is now trying to devise a method of plowing by power by the Use of two engines, one at either end of the field, propelling a cable between them, to which the plows may be attached. He believes this to be the best solution of the plowing by power problem, provided a, gasoline engine can be made with sufficient weight to propel the plows and still not be too heavy for practical utility. In fact, every experiment which is made in the work of the farm is commensurate with the size of the farm and its crop. But nothing is unwieldy, and the entire little state which the Sherman farm makes swings along with better system and with greater profit than commonwealths a century old. —World’s Work.