File:The American farmer. A complete agricultural library, with useful facts for the household, devoted to farming in all its departments and details (1882) (14577458319).jpg

Identifier: americanfarmerco01flin (find matches)
Title: The American farmer. A complete agricultural library, with useful facts for the household, devoted to farming in all its departments and details
Year: 1882 (1880s)
Authors: Flint, Charles L. (Charles Louis), 1824-1889 Miles, Manly, 1826-1898
Subjects: Agriculture
Publisher: Hartford, Conn., R. H. Park
Contributing Library: NCSU Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: NCSU Libraries

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ARMER horse-forks to feed it,and we were told,threshed 800 to 1,000bushels of wheat andput in bags per day.These bags remain inthe open field piled upin rows until taken awayby teams to the railroadstations We saw acresof bags piled up fivebags high awaiting ship-ment. On many of thelarge farms, the plow-ing is done by gang-plows, six abreast, anddrawn by ten or twelvehorses. A sower is at-tached to the plow, andin this way nine or tenacres of grain may beput in the ground in aday. And have youever thought of theimportance of labor-saving machines, asapplied to the arts ofhusbandry ? Withoutthe modern inventions,the crops of our coun-try could not be har-vested, its prosperitywould be paralyzed,-and a partial faminewould soon ensue. Howwonderful the improve-ments in our own day !Some of us rememberthe old wooden plow ofour boyhood, for whichwe often drove the teamafield, and which withmuch hard labor couldbe made toturn the fur-rows foronly aboutone acre perday. Com-p are thiswith the
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CEREALS. 281 modern iron plough suited to all soils and situations, and still more marvelous, the steamplough, walking like a thing of life across the broad prairie, turning up its numerous furrows,at once, and leaving behind it a broad wake like that of a majestic ship 1 Compare the oldscythe and sickle of our fathers, slowly and tediously gathering up their crops, with ourmowing and reaping machines, cutting down their ten to twenty acres per day 1 In climatesless favorable than California, where wheat cannot be immediately threshed in the field, theboimd sheaves are usually stacked until ready for threshing, or, where only small crops aregrown, the grain is put in a barn or shed. In some localities it is customary to put it in smallstacks or small collections of sheaves, which gives the grain a better opportunity of dryingwhere it is not fully ripened. When the season has been quite dry, it is common for our large grain growers to threshthe wheat without stacking it, but when it ha

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