ADVANCE IN MACHINERY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 February 1941, Page 9

ADVANCE IN MACHINERY

4 FARMING IN SOVIET RUSSIA. AHEAD OF OTHER LANDS? The experimental shops at Moscow are now working on a line of machines for harvesting flax, and this year mass production of flax combine-harvesters will be started at Lyubertsy. Soviet designers have also produced a sugarbeet combine which digs under the beet root, pulls it out of the ground, frees it of earth, cuts the leaves and prepares the root. A new cotton-picking machine has also been designed. Ten years ago. states the "Russia Today" Press Service, the first Soviet combine-harvester left the conveyors of the "Communard” Agricultural Machinery Works, Zaporozhe <the Ukraine). This marked the beginning of an entirely new branch of industry in the Soviet Union, the building of combineharvesters. Two years later a large department for combine-harvesters was opened in the Stalin Agricultural Machinery Works al Rostov, and their manufacture was also begun at the Lyubertsy Agricultural Machinery Works near Moscow. Today there are more than 180.000 combine-harvesters in the Soviet Union. In some of the southern regions and republics of the Union, practically the entire gain crop is harvested by combines; and 109] million acres were harvested by combine-harvesters in 1938. Since the first Soviet harvester appeared on the fields of the U.S.S.R. ten years ago, it has undergone considerable evolution and its design has been steadily improved Beginning with the production of a machine like the one employed in other countries, the industry of the USSR has built new original models, some of them with headers 40 to 50 feet wide, instead of the usual 16 to 20 fet This year the works at Zaporozhe have begun the serial production of an improved type of com-bine-harvester, which reduces by twothirds the small losses of grain in the harvesting and threshing processes, and the productive capacity of which is 20 to 30 per cent above that of the older model.

Until recently the plants of the U.S.i S R. had manufactured only one type of combine-harvester, which was adapted for the south and its dry and warm harvest weather and wide open spaces. This southern combine-harvester was not so ctficient v. lien operating in northern regions, and after considerable work, two collective farmers in the Leningrad Province, with the aid of ex- ; i rts, succeeded in making a combineharvester adapted for the heavier crops of the north. The combine, culled the “Northern," was then improved upon al the Lyubertsy works, and in 1939.

about S(H) of these combine-harvester' i •.sere used m harvesting grain in th< | northren parts of the U.S.S It The' ’ can be used to harvest crops. over ,e 1 extensive territory, reaching fr 1 , Archangel to the Far East, and fisan Turkmenistan t>. the Volga <!. trwt- ; Tins machine can be used to harvest I rice, millet and buck wheat in addition, to rye and wheat About 20 000 mot will be readv bv 1912. — :