RUBBER TYRES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 260, 2 November 1935, Page 22

RUBBER TYRES.

ON FARM IMPLEMENTS. AMERICAN EXPERIMENTS. INDUSTRY REVOLUTIONISED. LOS ANGELES. October 3.

Mr. Thomas D. Campbell, America's largest raiser of wheat and internationally known agricultural expert, reported in Los Angeles the preliminary results of experiments from which he envisages a new cycle of prosperity for the rubber tyre industry, and incidentally for agriculture.

"Within five years," he prophesied, "every single implement on the farm with the exception of the plough will run on rubber wheels." Acting for Harvey S. Firestone, of the Firestone Tyre and Rubber Company, Mr. Campbell has been conducting tests on rubbertyred equipment on his huge wheat farm at Hardin in Montana. A series of 1000-acre tests has not yet been completed, but he is already satisfied from preliminary data that rubber has linked itself inseparably to the future of farming.

"The application of pneumatic tyres to farm machinery undoubtedly will be a commercial success," he said. "I am sanguine enough of the figures, from our tests to feel certain that farming is entering a new era through this development, in which the rubber-tyred equipment will give us the efficiency from farm machinery which has been sadly lacking.

"The rubber industry cannot miss. Possibly the tyre makers have hit on something here that will inaugurate a new industrial cycle. The potentialities of the market are enormous, for the number of machines on the farms will use more rubber than the 25,000,000 passenger automobiles and trucks in service in the United 'States."

For every tractor on the farm, according to Mr. Campbell, there are live other tools which will require rubber wheels, including the combined harvester, the drill, etc. In his experiments for Firestone he has been using heavy-duty dual tyres on the tractors and the trailing equipment. With this equipment he has speeded up operations from three to five miles an hour. The old horse-drawn equipment progressed about two and a half miles an hour. By hitching rubbertyred trailers to trucks, the cost of transporting wheat to the railway has been substantially reduced in the tests conducted by the Campbell Farming Corporation. The 41-mile haul formerly cost about 3 cents a bushel for labour, gasoline and oil. The new method, Mr. Campbell figured, results in costs of :70 of one cent a bushel. Others to Figure. Not only will the ruber tyre manufacturers profit from the new market envisaged, but the accessory parts makers will come in for a sizeable share. The tyre rims, tyre irons, new wheels, etc., will be required. Moreover, agricultural machinery, according to this authority, must be redesigned for greater speed. The bulk of existing equipment was designed for horse locomotion.

j "Variable prices and inferior farm machinery have been the two greatest handicaps' to agricultural prosperity," the Montana authority declared. "The weather is not our worst enemy, as many people believe. The attempts to stabilise farm prices through the Hoover Federal Farm Board and the more

recent Agricultural Administration have given the farmer his greatest benefits. "As for the manufacturers of farm machinery, they have only given us a measure of efficiency in the last ten years. The western farms are liberally sprinkled with scrap heaps of worthless farm machinery which gave service of one or two years and then failed."

The Campbell Farming Corporation has reduced, under the A.A.A. law, its wheat acreage from 47,000 to 22,240 acres this season, and receives tbc largest processing tax cheque in the country. But in the last eight years the Campbell project lost more than 800,000 dollars, which could have been avoided, Mr. Campbell contended, if some equalising plan like the A.A.A. had been in operation. )'