AUTOMATIC FARMING.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 270, 11 May 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

AUTOMATIC FARMING.

<;LiAi.v-<.'i;<>\\'iN<; nv casolexe in WKSTKIIN* CANADA. Crossing I lie Saskatchewan prairie by iikilor oar a few weeks ago, long after dark (writes a correspondent of the London Times I. I saw wliat seemed to In- a hulking lil.ick monster with fiery eyes crawling over the plain and pulling gently as it went. "It's Mr. S-aud-So's breaking outfit." my companion explained. That is what farming has come to in the Canadian West. There is, of course, a vast amount of more primitive farming in the West : even oil the dry, open prairie the majority of cultivators have neither land nor capital enough for the latest methods. The man who docs adopt these methods for cultivation on the grand scale--well, it seems almost absurd to call him a fanner, The agiict,Ultra] community of the West is divided into two classes, which certainly often overlap, bul are nevertheless pretty clearly defined. The "grain grower" does not think himself much complimented if you call inm a "farmer"; and the farmer speaks with humorous contempt of the grain-grower as "a mere wheat miner." whose proceedings are also reprobated in some quarters as leading to exhaustion of the soil's fertility. The engine ploughing all night illustrates the stage attained by the graingrower in raising—or reducing, if you will- agriculture to the level of a great manufacturing industry, carried on with all the mechanical skill, the financial i ability, the mathematical calculation [ which would naturally be devoted to any great industry carried on under a factory roof. I A few miles from (he city of Saskatoon I visited one of the farms of a Norwegian who went as a young man to the; United States, spent 20 years there, came over the border five or six years ago. -and made money in land dealing, lie was not content only to sell land for others to use. Big stretches of it he is cultivating and cultivating magnificently. On the place I visited he had this year put. 1400 acres under wheat, which promised an average of 30 bushels an acre, and would, fetch 3s 4d a bushel, or £7OOO for the 42.000 busheds. Also 300 acres of flax, with an average of 17 ibushels. making another £2125, the price being about 8s 4d a bushel. (The price has risen appreciably since). Also 100 acres of oats, producing about 9500 bushels for his own live stock. A gasolene engine was pulling four binders, each of which was reaping an Bft swath of wheat—until we arrived, when men stopped for a "tea" of cofTee and currant bread. A little way oft' stood a neat white wooden house, where the resident manager lived; a big stable for 20 hprses; an ice-house, the ice being cut from the Saskatchewan river in winter; and a pig house, clean as a dining room, with a j cement floor below, and a staging of > boards, to which the animals climbed when they wanted (as pigs do) to rest on plenty of straw. On this farm, besides the manager, two or three men are employed all the year round: and seven others (at £7 a month, with board and lodging) for the seven open months: I Extra men are engaged for harvest at 10s a day. The engineer gets £ls a month and all found. The millionaire is not much less, rare among grain-growers than he is among farmers: but T liave been surprised at the number of men engaged in this business on a large scale. Perhaps the example best known here is that of the Canadian Wheatfields (Limited), an English company which has taken over 64,000 acres from the Southern Alberta Laml Company and is going to take 50,000 more. It has for chairman one who has made a great success in farming in England, and, what is more important, it has got as resident manager the late head of the Dominion Government's experimental farm in Manitoba. The company started work only last year, but when I visited the scene of operations in August 12,000 acres of prairie had been broken—oooo ploughed by steam and gosolene engines, the rest by oxen. It was curious to see the two extremes of motive power meeting on one estate—the very newest thing in traction, and the very oldest. To our eyes, oxen yoked to a plough look primitive: but they are very useful either on patches of land dotted with surface stones —rounded lumps, dropped from pro-historic Halting ice, and rarely too large for a man to lift—or on fairly steep slopes, the corrugations of a generally Hat or gently undulating prairie. As between steam and gasolene engines, the latter seem to have had the advantage, at any rate last year; the price of coal having gone up from sdol. to Odol. a ton (say, from 21s to 40s). because of the strike, though now it is down again to odol. or (idol. The title '•automatic farming" which 1 have applied, with a touch of perhaps excusable exaggeration, to (lie new system of wholesale grain-growing by machinery is likely to be much nearer the truth a year or two hence. At present the very ease with which a man can rapidly put vast areas under cultivation brings more than he can chew—to put in more grain than he can reap and thresh, human labor being as scarce as it is. The common practice is not to stack the wheat and thresh at leisure from the stack, but to pile the sheaves in little stooks to be threshed in the field. At harvest time, therefore, at least eight and possibly 17 men per engine itself, one on. each of the four binders, and from three to 12 (according as the crop is light or heavy) following to pick up and stook the sheaves. The implement makers have now invented a device for stooking by machinery; and when such a device proves completely successful, it will more than half solve the. labor problem, which is growing more and more serious with every harvest.