ARMING BY MACHINERY
By PROFESSOR J. A. SCOTT WATSON 'DURING the past two years several causes have combined to intensify the interest of the larger- Seale farmer in the problems of farm-mechanisation.- For one thing, he sees fresh hope for his economic future, and is the more willing to face the capital cost of 're-equipment. Again, a long period of depression in horse-breeding has resulted, at last, in a rather acute 'scarcity of home-bred farm-horses, and even the diversion of Belgian supplies from Germany to Britain has not been enough to fill'the gap. High prices for horses have made tractors cheap by comparison. The industrial revival, too, is causing a real shortage of man-power in many districts, and even where there is no actual scarcity of hands the farmer is' no longer deterred, by the fear of creating unemployment in his village, from adopting labour-saving devices. Lastly, several recent inventions have created new possibilities.
The broad position as between horse and tractor is now clear enough. A tractor that is handled with ordinary care and knowledge, and is loaded somewhere near to its capacity, can perform any of the more straightforward field operations — ploughing, cultivating, harrowing, rolling, and the. drilling and reaping of corn crops—at little more than half the cost of horse-labour. Moreover, it is possible to devise systems of farming that can be run entirely by mechanical power, and a few horseless farms have already histories of several years.
In such cases, however, the farming has been delibe- rately planned for the tractor, with more or less sacrifice of efficiency in other directions. On the ordinary farm there arc many tasks where the horse is still the' more economical source of power. Take only one example— the collection of sugar-beet or other roots from the field. If we put a tractor and trailer to such a task, the tractor- engine will be idling for the greater part of the time that the load is being collected. The engine will tend to run too cold, and cold running on paraffin is the worst possible thing for its " innards," while running on petrol more than doubles the fuel cost ; the tractor-driver cannot effectively help with the loading, because of the necessity for very frequent starts and stops ; and in the end the size of the load is severely limited by the ordinary state of the land in late autumn. Horses in certain numbers, then, are needed for certain jobs, and must sometimes be used for work that a tractor could do better—or else stand idle in the stables. To decide how far he can sub- stitute tractors for horses is a question for the individual farmer. 'The substitution can rarely be complete.
Progress is however being made in the direction of widening the tractor's range of uses. One fertile idea has been to equip it with two (or even three) alternative sets of wheels. The new large low-pressure rubber tyres are excellent on any' sort of road and give enough adhesion on any but the most slippery of field surfaces. They have almost completely solved the problem of the longer farm haul, made partly Over tarred roads, partly over farm tracks and partly over mother earth. Narrow-rimmed wheels, whose distance apart can be adjusted, enable the same tractor to work among potato or sugar-beet rows, doing often less damage to the plants than the average horse ; and wide' steel-rimmed wheels, with spuds or strakes, give perhaps the best service for ploughing. For light and fast work on firm going—hay-tedding or hay- sweeping, for instance--a useful tractor may -be made by gearing down' and otherwise adaptjng an old• motor car ; or 'a high-powered ear whi6h is past service on the roads may be made to ' serve the turn without -any adaptat ion. There is one note of anxiety that must be sounded in connexion with the rapidly increasing number of farm tractors.- The horse runs on home-grown oats and hay, the' tractor on imported oil. It would be impossible to think of reverting to horses in time of War ; the hors- es Would not exist, and it would take many. years to breed up the numbers required. If we must-plan for an increase Of home food-production in time of war, part of our plan Must be the rapid adaptation of our tractors to .burn alternative fuel. It seems that there is 'no insuperable difficulty about attaching a suction-gas plant to the tractor, so that the farmer could turn over to coal or even to home-produced - charcoal and leave the oil for other uses.
The American " combine " harvester was first tried in England in 1928, and last harvest about Sixty of these machines were at work in our fields. The combine, by telescoping the reaping and the threshing of corn, eliminates most of the man-labour of the harvest, and the grain-drier which is used in conjunction makes the ingathering of the crops much less dependent on the weather. • The 1936 -harvest provided many English users with- their first experience of the combine under really difficult conditions—tangled crops and -long spells of unsettled weather. The new system stood the test very well. Standing corn was Often dry enough to thresh when the neighbouring farmer's shocks were too wet to carry, and although the combine may have left numbers of ears ungathered it secured the bulk of the grain in good condition in a year when much binder-reaped corn was spoilt. In the past the gathering of the straw behind the combine has been ,a troublesome and rather tedious job; but a new machine, which can pick up the bulk of the straw and. tie it in bundles, became available last year.
All the American and Australian combines are designed to deal with the typical crops of these countries, which yield perhaps three to six sacks of corn an acre and a relatively small bulk of straw. Moreover they work on the assumption that straw -is worthless, and may therefore be cheWed to pieces and left scattered on-the field. These machines were never meant to digest twelve-sack crops with five-foot-long straw. If the farmer drives them at speed through such crops he must 'be content to leave a long stubble and an untidy mess behind him. Nevertheless the typical combine-gang of perhaps seven men can look back to the 1936 harvest with some satisfaction. Two or three thousand sacks of corn, all fit for bread or ale, and perhaps two hundred tons of straw in rick, represent a considerable achievement in the circumstances.
The most exciting of recent mechanical developments is the revival, in a more practical shape, of the old idea of artificially drying - grass. Nearly forty - driers, of several different makes; were at work last summer. The herbage is cut while it is still .young and leafy. It may be collected straight off the knife of a machine which works on the same principle as a- lawn-mower, or it may be left in wads, to lose some of its moisture, in the field. The herbage is then dried by means of furnace gases and is either tightly compressed into bales or is ground and sacked. From orie point of view the process is a complete success. The nutritive value of • the fresh 'grass—its' digestibility, its energy value and even - its vitamin potency—is so completely conserved , thiit the loss is practically negligible. The product' is far superior to -good hay, because the plant is tut at a stage when tart little of-its substance has been converted into indigestible fibre. Moreover the product can be turned out in any sort 4;f-weather.: Sit is greedily eaten by all grass-eating animals, and may be successfully used, even for pigs and poultry, as a substitute for the green-stuff that is often so hard to come by in winter.
BUt there is more doubt about the economics of the process. The capital investment runs to a good many hundreds of pounds, and both the fuel cost and the labour cost are higher than was expected, When, all reasonable charges, including depreciation, have been taken into account, the cost of the material has generally run to a figare of nearly six pounds a ton, which is but very little below the price at which the farmer could buy other feeding-stuffs of comparable value. Last season, indeed, was a difficult one, for the moisture content : of the fresh grass often exceeded 80 per cent., instead of the normal 75. This meant that four tons of water had to be boiled off, instead of three, before a ton of dry material was produced. Again, most of the plants were in a semi-experimental stage, and both the makers and the working staffs had things to learn. Perhaps in the circumstances the financial results are not disappointing.
If we think again of war risks, the new process has important possibilities. Its widespread adoption would ensure a plentiful supply of winter milk without the necessity to import the cattle-cakes whose lack was so serious a matter twenty years ago.
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