NECESSITY FOR IMPROVEMENT OF FARM IMPLEMENTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2467, 26 June 1901, Page 8

NECESSITY FOR IMPROVEMENT OF FARM IMPLEMENTS.

(Professor M'Oonnoll, in the North British

Agriculturist.)

To my mind It is an exceedingly retro grade step on the part of any show committee to curtail r)ie implement department ii any -,vay, because ilie development of our implements is going to be — and, in fact, is now— -the most important concern of the faim. For generations we have been imI .loving our live stock, until now it is the best in the world, and all other countries come to us for animals with which to de\o!op their native stock. Ours arc, of course, by no "meanis perfect yet— -for Ayrshires are not yet polled, nov have ClydesOales sensible iet'ocks — but i f is now high time to give the improvement of our implements a turn.

That they are capable of very great improvement has been my belief since boyhood. As a boy my love of machinery was great enough to take me to Glasgow, where I woiked in a fitting shop till driven out by the British artisan ; but the love has remained, and within ihe last 10 years I have been reorganising my own implement department with the best results. The study of ftie subject during these few years, moreoxer, has opened my eyes to many things, •and among others, to the fact that farming is not only behind all other human occupations, in the development of its appliances, but that we here in Britain, are manj- years behind the Ameiican*,, and c\<zn the Continentals, in the manufacture and use of la-bour-saving implement I.1 '. Two visits paid to America about 10 years ago opened my eyes to what it was possible to do in this line, and since then I have been gradually superseding my old implements with new American ones;- — -solely because I cannot get in this, country the particular varieties I want, and any attempt I have made to get such things here has only got cold water thrown on it by the home makers. In the item of a horse lake, for instance, "Implement Maker" offers lo supply me with one up to 18ft wide if I like, and I have since come across a maker who is building one 20ft wide for a customer ; but that does not alter the fact that at least two, if not three, makers were applied to by me within the last two years regarding the making of a two-horse rake, and all replied that they had plenty of trade in making the old* sorts. This, in fact, is the almost universal attitude of manufacturers in this country. They have their patterns, machinery, templates, etc., all arranged for making a certain variety of implement; they can sell this to farmers who do not know anything about "implements, and when I, a round-shouldered, brownfaced, '"country-looking Johnny," humbly suggest to the giib-tongued, smart business man at the stand — who understands ( all about commission and cash in a. Month — that this implement is capable of improvement, I get snuffed out. and retire with a feeling that lam eoiry I spoke. That this is a common experience with others who rea'iso the inefficiency of our implements I have had some proof. The publication of an article in Yin ton's Almanac brought me a lot of private letters. One received from an engineering farmer contains the following sentence: — '"The chief aim of manufacturers is to block any new idea likely to clash v ith their interests, for, as you have well said, their own machines are imperfect." I will go so far as to say that Scottish makers arp not so bad as English ones in this respect, while I have found some American firms just as unwilling to listen to requests for improvements as the makeis on this side of the Atlantic ; but still it is fiom America that the most of our improvements Lave come, and if our home makers mean to hold their own, they will need to provide themselves with a new set of id 3a?. The ordinary farmer is a keen judge of stock of all sort«, but he has hitherto known very little about machinery, and he was content lo buy anything that was offered to him, pro\ided that it could do its woik at nil. Now the stress of labour is compelling him ti look into the matter, and to seek after the i eduction of work by the proper appliances, only to find that he must go abroad for the same.

If any proof is needed for this assertion I could give a '-core of cases in point right off the reel : but one or two may be giv en by way of illustration. Some 10 yeors Kgo Mr John Spe?r introduced the American sweep rake to my notice, and some seven yeprs ago sent me one •if had to try it. In its original form it \.ould not work* but I gob gojme

made on it, which made it a success, and now for the last six years I ha\e handled all my hay (253 acres per annum) ivi r h it. Two j ears ago I became so dissatisfied vvnli the ordinary English elevator that I determined to have a change. I bought the best horse-fork made in England, only to find it was too slow and laborious for my •wcrk. I therefore determined to procure' the stacking machine, which was made to) accompany the sweep-rake as part of the set, and actually had arranged with the bai !<] at home to send a cheque to the firm in Illinois, when I discovered that -'in ageiit some 20 miles from me had got 0113 on tale. I set off by the first train, bought ihe implement, had it home and tried with threa days. Within a week I had wrecked ifc twice, and had to go to the foundry fa" fresh castings, but eventually got it repaired, and so braced and strutted that it stood heavy work, and I put up the greater part of my hay with it. Now, with my own improvements and alterations, I expect this coming summer to be able to whack up 50 or 60 tons of stuff daily on to the stack, provided that the stuff grows at all, and my men are jubilant at the relief from heavy work. With this set of tackle I can gather up the hay from the quilo or windrow, or oven from the- swathe, and stack it at this rate with eight men, or even less ; but the point is, that the whole thing is an American arrangement, and I have discarded home implements in favour of it. Take another example. For very many years I have been pick of the wastful system of threshing with the ordinary portable threshing machine, and lately have been casting about to find if there is no better way. These big "bolters" are unnecessarily complicated and wasteful both of stuff and labour—one working to me just now as I write ejecting its straw, grain, cavings, chaff dust, etc., in 14 different places — while the amount of grain -delivered in a day is not more than half what Americans are accustomed to. This difference is not entirelydue to the longer and heavier straw of this country, because, if we have straw of this nature we have also double the grain to the acre, which means that the proportion of straw to grains-is probably the same in each case. The difference is really due to the difference in the machines. I have had an opportunity of seeing threshing done in America, and hay c lately been investigating the more recent makes of the "separators," as they are called, which are in use an the other side of the Atlantic, and this is what I fmd : The sheaves are thrown on to a feeder, which cuts the string bands itself, and passes the stuff into the drum. The grain is delivered by a spout high enough to shoot it into a big box cart, by which it is carried to the granary, or "elevator," without sacking at all. The straw, chaff, and cavings are all made to deliver into a large fan at" the rear end of the machine, by which the whole lot is blown olean away some 20yds or so, and allowed to pile itself up into a stack, shaped like a potato clamp, but which. i 3 safe from spoiling by ordinary rain, and requiries no builders or forkers to put up. Now this machine is handled by about eight men, and puts from 1000 to 2000 bushels o£ wheat through it in a day, and I very naturally want to know why we cannot have these sort of threshers in this country. I know of nothing to prevent their use here, even as they stand, while it is easy to modify them to separate the chaff, to bag the grain, and so on.

The sum of the whole matter is that, if we are to meet the scarcity of labour, and keep ourselves going against foreign competition, we must have a complete overhaul of our implements and machinery, and adopt, as far as possible, the methods of our foreign competitors. I have myself been long preparing for this, but the making or altering of machines is too expensive for a private individual like myself, and I have already spent more than I can rightly afford in this kind of work. No doubt it will pay -me in the long run. but the initial expense is heavy. I read, with a sigh of envy and! regret, of t % e thousands of pounds squandered on yachts, racehorses, gambling, gamepreserving, etc., by "idle rich" wastrels, and think of how much I could do, if I had the money, that would be of real value to farming and to the nation as a whole. But this only makes me all the more "liled" at our home manufacturers-, whose business it is to develop and improve implements, when I find that it is only perhaps one in five who has any progressive notions, and the other four seem determined to prevent all progress. If our big societies, from the "Royal" downwards, really want to develop and help on farming, they must lend themselves to the testing and introduction and improvement of implements in a much more efficient manner than they have ever jet done.