AGRICULTURAL TRACTORS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 25, 14 September 1911, Page 3

AGRICULTURAL TRACTORS.

GREAT INCREASE IN CANADA. The picture of the immensity of the Canadian field for agriculture is drawn by a Manitoba: correspondent of the London “Times.” In the Canadian West there are, he states, 357,000,000 acres of laud known to be capable of producing wheat and other cereals. Five years ago less than five milloin acres had been sown with wheat, - and the total cultivated land for all purposes did not exceed ton million acres. This season (1911) 10,'200,000 acres have been sown with wheat, '4,678,000 acres with oats, 1,150,000 with barley/ and 751,822 acres with flax—u total in grain crops alone of 16,779,822 acres. The increase in production bids fair to he more rapid in the coming five years than it has been in the past, on account of the extensive use of agricultural tractors. During the spring of 1911 over £200,000 worth of tractors, representing over 14,000 horsepower, were shipped from Winnopeg to prairie farms. The average gasolene tractor can break from 20 to 30 acres of virgin soil per day, at an average cost for gasolene or petrol of Is 6d per acre. One of these tractors can plough stubble land at an average rate of -10 acres a day. There are literally millions of acres which these tractors may be put to work without any preliminary preparation. The use of tractors lias made possible the cultivation of the largo farm—that is, the farm running from 10,000 to 59,000 acres. Farms of this size are not profitable when the farmer had to depend wholly on horse power for his operations. It is the possibility of successfully using engines capable of turning ton or twelve furrows of virgin prairie soil that has made larger developments possible in Canada. In spite of the influx of settlers, farm labour is always difficult to obtain, and is costly, while one of the drawbacks under which farmers have laboured in the past has been the difficulty of securing men who could lie trusted ro look after valuable horses. An engine which will plough 40 acres a day can be operated with less than half the

men required to look after the horses necessary to plough 20 acres in a day. Under these conditions, many predict the wheat production of the Canadian West will even perhaps he doubled in the next three years.