The machine and the farm

It is easy to misread it, but the rush for farm machinery in the past few years has looked like that final revolution in agriculture. Looking out upon the vast and vastly complex scene of U.S. agriculture, it appeared at first glance that the miracle of American industrial production had been repeated upon the farm.

And in a very real sense it had. Record after crop record has been smashed as the good earth of the U.S. yielded up an almost unbelievable bounty. Forty million more people than there were in 1920 were now fed from roughly the same area of cultivated land—some 360 million acres—and with a million and a half less workers. Consider that basic index of civilization: the number of people required to produce food. In 1800 three out of four in the working population were in agriculture; only one out of four was available for all the rest of the work of society—industrial, commercial, professional, intellectual, and what not. Throughout most of the world that ratio still holds true. In 1948 only one in seven U.S. workers is needed to provide the nation’s food. Each of the nation’s ten million farm workers provides enough food and fiber for himself and thirteen other citizens. What is more, he is helping to supply European and other countries with huge tonnages of farm products.

Thus, close to the mid-century, agriculture seemed to have caught up—somewhat tardily, to be sure—with the rest of the American enterprise system. The formula of science and research, plus capital, plus freedom for individual initiative, was working in agriculture as miraculously as it had in industry.

There are now more than three million tractors on American farms, twice as many as there were eight years ago, and, in addition, some 35 million pieces of other farm machinery whose variety is as startling as it is enormous. Riding the biggest boom he has ever known, the farmer has had for the first time the cash—the four and five-figure cash—that mechanization requires. Sales of farm equipment have been running up and up to more than $1.26 billion last year—nearly ten times the 1947 sales of machine tools.

Both the avidity of the farmer for mechanization and his present cash position are, of course, products of the war, but they are wholly new phenomena in the history of agriculture. It would be difficult to overestimate what they imply for the future of farming. But there is general agreement—perhaps the one agreement that can be found in the highly controversial field of agriculture—that the U.S. farm promises the greatest opportunity for advance of any major area of the U.S. economy. In short, the most astonishing fact about farming today is that the agricultural revolution is not complete; it is just beginning its final phase.

Basic research, which yields its enormous rewards far in the future, has hardly started. The geneticists, the agronomists, the chemists, the entomologists, and the engineers feel the future is only now beginning to open up. The chemical, oil, and rubber industries have swung the full power of their research techniques upon the productive problems of food and fiber. These exciting developments—and they lie beneath the surface of every phase of agriculture—must be left to future articles. Except for this: the key word is “integration”—integrated research (chemical-weed-killer men working with plant researchers and soil chemists); integrated operations (fit the crop to the soil, fit the machine to both the crop and the soil, or if that can’t be done, breed a plant for the machine and remodel the land); integrated machinery (make buildings into machines, coordinate machines with buildings as well as with other machines).

This article considers only the state of integration in machinery. In the vocabulary of the production engineer, farm production is “discontinuous,” that is, it is a series of independent operations, some highly efficient (combine harvesting), some appallingly inefficient (tobacco farming). Despite the tremendous number of machines now on American farms, it is still true that agriculture could have gained far more from industry than it has.

It should not be imagined that the mechanization of American farms is by any means complete. Farmers still own some ten million horses and mules, and 60 per cent of all farm work is done by hand. Some of their methods of cultivation would be hard to distinguish from their Sumerian counterparts of 3500 B.C. The uneven pattern of mechanization has been determined in great measure by type rather than by size of farm. Thus dairy, cattle, and fruit farms are on the whole the least mechanized. One reason, of course, is that both the handling of livestock and the picking of fruits call for more judgment and care than anyone has yet been able to build into a machine.

Conversely, the mechanization of standard crop farming is relatively well advanced. Tractor-powered implements for tilling, cultivating, planting, and harvesting have reached an incredible diversity; International Harvester Co.’s catalogue, for example, lists over 350 pages of such equipment. Nearly all of this machinery goes to handle the three biggest U.S. crops: the food grains (wheat, rice, rye, and buckwheat), the feed grains (corn, oats, barley, and sorghums), and hay, which together cover 84 per cent of the nation’s harvested acreage. Cotton, covering 6 per cent, has just begun to submit to mechanization; this year only 3 per cent of the total crop will be gathered by International Harvester’s new mechanical pickers.

The most spectacular tools and techniques are to be found in California, where, as the reader will see on pages 94 and 95, mechanisms are bigger and more ingenious than anywhere else in the country. California is tremendously fertile not only in soil but in ideas, and it will continue to furnish inventions that are taken over the mountains, modified for the plains, and eventually reach the South and Northeast. But California is a specialized case. It is more profitable for the student of mechanization to study the more normal parts of the country, starting first with a quick glance back at how farm mechanization reached its present state.

Slow going

The agricultural revolution began in the U.S.—and began slowly—at the close of the eighteenth century, about the time that farmer Thomas Jefferson worked out a scientifically efficient moldboard plow. More than forty years passed between the first American patent on a reaper and the appearance of the first factory-produced model of Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1847. Throughout the rest of the nineteenth century appeared the disk harrow, the cultivator, the hay rake, the hay loader, and scores of other farm tools. Many of the laborsaving devices were as simple as the manure carrier and the rope sling for hoisting hay that farmer William Louden mounted on a wooden monorail in 1867, both of which served the farmer virtually unchanged for fifty years. Meantime Louden Machinery Co. went on to leadership in industrial conveyer systems for twentieth-century industry. Other inventions, like the oscillating mower, the planter, the manure spreader, the grain thresher, and the milking machine were fairly intricate. And some of these early machines were so complicated that they have only recently been perfected—the corn picker and the cotton picker, for example. But the fact remains that practically every one of the basic general tools now known to farmers had been thought out and built before the turn of the century. They took from the production of food most of the elemental backbreaking labor of the antique sickle, scythe, shovel, fork, and hoe.

Shift to horsepower

For the first forty years of this century, the problem was to switch from the horse to horsepower—the development of the tractor and the adaptation of horse-drawn machines to mechanical power.

What transformed the tractor from a four-wheeled horse to a modern prime mover was, first, the perfection of the economical heavy-duty, high-compression engine; second, the introduction of the tricycle-type front wheel that made the tractor maneuverable and thus usable for row-crop farming; and third, the simple substitution of rubber tires for the spiked or cleated steel wheels it had been rolling on for thirty-odd years. Mounted on rubber, the tractor acquired the virtues the farmer had been looking for—more speed, flexibility, and ease of handling. Indeed, the rubber-tired tractor may be, as some believe, the greatest agricultural improvement since the invention of the moldboard plow.

Following the shift to rubber came the application of hydraulic controls and fully mounted tools, which enabled the tractor, originally a substitute for the horse, to perform all kinds of farming jobs. These two developments took the hard work out of tilling and made possible a whole line of other tools, such as scoops, buck rakes, lifts, and bulldozers. Complete machines, like the three-ton cotton picker, are now mounted directly on the tractor. As a stationary engine, the tractor’s power plant can be hitched up to drive an assortment of smaller mechanisms, ranging from posthole diggers to nut-tree shakers.

As the tractor has evolved into the almost universal prime mover of agriculture, a lot of other farm machinery has been developed for special operations. Thus there are now hay choppers and hay crushers as well as hay balers, and beet diggers and sugar-beet diggers as well as potato diggers. And there are huge “landplanes” for leveling the earth for irrigation. One manufacturer is working on a machine for digging the rocks out of a field, crushing them, and spreading the pulverized rock back over the soil. On the other hand, some machines now perform several functions—the small, all-purpose combine is good for 125 different crops, for example, and the forage harvester can be used for both corn and hay. Along with these machines a few radically different tillage tools have appeared, notably the rotary tiller, invented by the Swiss in 1911, which in one fast and violent operation can prepare land for seeding.

The farmer and the manufacturer

It might be assumed that, in view of the machines he has and those he has to choose from, the well-heeled farmer of 1948 would be a relatively happy entrepreneur. To hear him talk, this is not so at all. From coast to coast, from large and small farmers, arises a dismal chorus of complaints about their machinery and about the industry that makes it. The farmer, of course, claims the hereditary privilege of grousing. As an American, he claims the inalienable right to perennial dissatisfaction. But to this chorus of complaints are joined the more authoritative voices of agricultural engineers, of professional farm managers and consultants, and of a number of industrialists who have had direct contact with the farm-machinery industry.

What is the bill of particulars? The first and major group of complaints concerns mechanical failures and breakdowns. Repairs cost priceless time as well as money, for while a machine is laid up in the shop the farmer may lose many times its entire worth in loss or damage to his crops. Awkward engineering means that one broken part may require a major tear down job. Sometimes an item of farm equipment is so carelessly engineered that it has to be strengthened or modified before it can do a satisfactory job. Maintenance is now such a large item on the heavily mechanized farm that a well-equipped machine shop is a necessity, in constant use. Small electrical welding units have sold so well in one mid-western area that, in the words of a power-company official, the transformers on the local power lines have been “hopping off the poles.”

Farmers are bitter about maintenance and many go so far as to charge that the industry is purposely selling cheap machines in order to profit on spare parts. No manufacturer, of course, could consciously pursue such a policy and stay in business. The farmer’s complaint is based on the fact that, on a per pound basis, replacement parts cost roughly three to four times as much as new machines, which is not out of line with the pricing ratios in any comparable industry. But the farmer who is struggling with a breakdown is not apt to be in a mood of sweet reasonableness.

The next group of complaints centers on the lack of initiative of the equipment makers. Improvements come slowly. Yet opportunities for improvement are often so simple and obvious that a farmer, with only a welding set and power drill, can make them himself, e.g. a shield to cover an open sprocket on a field chopper. Again, for instance, though a constant running power take-off was shown to be a practical mechanism for tractors in France as early as 1906, American farm-equipment makers have only lately been considering the insistent demand for it; this year one company incorporated this feature in new models as an extra. Along with their annoyance at such delays in engineering improvements, many farmers chide the industry for letting the farmer do so much of the inventing and developing of new tools. As one put it: “They save a lot of money by letting the farmers do the pioneering; then give you the backhanded compliment of following you.”

The industry’s defense

It is not to be supposed for a moment that the industry takes this kind of criticism meekly, or hangs its head in remorse. For equipment manufacturers know they have done a good job on a great many farm machines, and an outstanding job on tractors. Since tractors and tractor parts comprise 40 per cent of the industry’s total sales, it has considerable cause for pride in that alone. At the same time, moreover, some of the 1,043 manufacturers in the industry have unloaded on the farmer a lot of undubitably poor machinery, and on that score the reputable suffer undeservedly.

What is the industry’s case? To begin with, many of the farmer’s grievances can be laid at his own gate, for he commonly overloads and misuses his tools. Some of this must be expected, for, unlike the manufacturer, who can control his working conditions, the farmer operates his tools in dust, mud, rocks, and other hazards to mechanical functioning, including bugs. The development of International Harvester’s cotton picker, for instance, was stymied for more than three years until ways were found to prevent the juice of squashed bugs from gumming up the picker’s 600 barbed spindles. (The answer: a lubrication system for moistening the spindles.) Similar obstacles have made the job of supplying foolproof tools anything but easy.

Some of the farmer’s complaints about the quality of his equipment are also explained by the fact that he has demanded a great variety of tools. In attempting to supply them, equipment makers have had to use semi-custom production methods, and so have been unable to employ either mass production or the precision techniques of the tractor plant. There has been, in fact, no true mass market for any farm machines, except tractors. One manufacturer, for example, still carries more than 100 models of moldboard plows; another, which tried to reduce its plow models to one, has concluded that at least thirty are necessary.

But the industry’s defense rests mainly on two historic facts: the farmer’s low income in the past and his extreme reluctance to try anyone else’s “newfangled” machine. Since the farmer has rarely enjoyed a large cash income, the industry necessarily made tools he could afford. In some cases this meant the use of low-cost and relatively brittle iron castings instead of alloy steels. And it also meant that the industry, forced to keep its prices down, has remained a low-profit business; over the last thirty years the highest average rate of return on capital investment among the large companies was less than 10 per cent, and several have made less than 3 per cent. Those are not the profit margins that build great research laboratories and engineering staffs. The industry’s sales last year reached more than $1.26 billion, of which 73 per cent went to the seven dominant companies.* But the industry is still relatively small, if not young, and it has had no such great sums to spend on research as the oil, chemical, and electrical-equipment industries have had.

To a large extent, the financial position of the farmer and of the industry explains why there has been, as the farmer charges, a lack of pioneering and research development among farm-equipment makers. As an industry, it has not been attractive to many engineers, since so many other industrial fields offered far greater promise. In the past, much of the engineering was done by “graduate blacksmiths.” Although in recent years many of the large companies have taken on more young engineering talent, no company could be said to be overburdened with it even now. Many companies continue to believe they can best serve the farmer by depending on him for the invention of new machines.* As one executive recently expressed it: “We do not create; we are the servants of the farmer.” The farm-equipment industry is a very conservative industry.

There are, happily, a few signs that it may be changing some of its policies. One is the move of several large companies to buy up established equipment manufacturers in California, where farmers’ complaints about breakage have always been the loudest. Following the example set by Deere in 1937, International Harvester, Allis-Chalmers, Massey-Harris, and Case have all acquired or built California factories specializing in heavy-duty tillage and harvesting machinery. Californians, characteristically, voice dark fears that the products of these small specialized factories will suffer; but the new owners, at any rate, may pick up some fresh ideas in the land of agricultural invention.

Moreover, others outside the farm-equipment industry have recently taken an interest in its industrial potentials. This year the Sperry Corp. (precision instruments) bought the New Holland Machine Co. (stone crushers), which developed and put over the first completely automatic field baler and has gone on to experiment with a heavy rotary tillage machine. And fabulous Food Machinery Corp. (FORTUNE, April, 1947) has branched out heavily into farm equipment and chemicals. Many another outsider, like the steel companies and the building-material companies, is beginning to show a lively interest in the farm market.

To mechanize or not to mechanize?

Part of the challenge to industrialists lies in solving some of the problems that mechanization has raised for the farmer. For the drive toward mechanization has caught him up in an economic spiral that is threatening to get out of control. One reason is that many farmers simply cannot resist the obvious time and laborsaving appeal of machinery. Example: total labor requirements per acre of corn grown and harvested with horses and hand pickers are three times those needed with four-row tractor equipment and a mechanical picker.

These virtues of mechanization are universally true, but on some crops time and labor savings with machinery may be heavily offset by losses in quality of the final product. Take the cotton picker: one test in the Mississippi Delta area showed that hand-picking costs were more than five times those of mechanical picking—nearly $38 a bale as against about $7. Yet because of the trash in the machine-picked cotton, its quality was lowered by one or two grades for an average loss of more than $18 a bale. Field losses—cotton damaged in the field by the picker—raised this to $26 a bale. Thus the cotton picker saved only about $4 a bale over hand methods. One big operator in California figures that his over-all savings with this machine are only $1.50 or so a bale.

Tractor-drawn and self-propelled machines have other advantages over and above their laborsaving features that make them irresistible to the farmer. Being so much faster, they give the farmer far greater control over weather risks. Even after a long rainy spell, he can get his crop into the ground in time, as thousands of corn-belt farmers did last year when they recouped what promised to be a total loss on their cornfields. Since there are usually a few best days or hours for harvesting any given crop, working at night under searchlights is now a common practice on thousands of farms. For what the farmer could lose through being too slow or too late with his harvest might be many times what it would cost him to have machines on hand at the right moment. And with airplanes to dust his fields, the farmer can check within a few hours a potentially disastrous invasion of pests or disease.

Thus impelled to buy machinery to reduce his operating risks, the farmer is apt to pile up a capital-investment risk in equipment all out of proportion to the size of his business. Yet as a capitalist—and not a small one, either—the farmer must use his capital profitably. He knows that with farm machinery direct operating costs per acre will be lower because the land can be worked faster. He knows that savings in man-hours help to offset costs very rapidly today. But he also knows that year after year, interest, depreciation, and repairs on machinery can seriously cut his profits unless he gets a lot of use out of his equipment—or unless he can sell his machines and buy new models every couple of years. A manufacturer can count on using a $10,000 turret lathe, say, for 2,000 or more hours a year. The farmer, however, may use his $3,200 hay baler for only fifty hours. He gets most use out of his tractor, but the U.S. average is only 600 hours a year, and for many implements it is less than sixty.

Forced expansion

This low rate of use is the joker in farm mechanization, for it has induced thousands of farmers to buy more land in order to make their investment in machines pay off. The average size of the American farm has risen as a result from 160 to nearly 200 acres since 1940. With a very high-profit crop—onions, for instance—and with superior management, a small farmer may mechanize and stay small. But the small, ordinary farmer who mechanized but could not expand has often found that what machines saved him in time and labor may have been lost in overhead—particularly in repairs and depreciation charges. In which case he can either sell out, fall back on subsistence farming and take a job in town, or try to cut his overhead by using his machines to do custom work for local farmers. If he owns tractor-mounted earth-moving implements, he may also pick up spare-time non-farming jobs, such as strip mining or ditch digging.

In several areas state agricultural colleges and other research groups have analyzed this problem of farm-machinery usage fairly accurately. Findings on one point at least are roughly similar: mechanization is not likely to pay off for most farmers working less than 100 acres of tillable cropland. A 1946 study of implement and tractor use in Kentucky, for example, showed that overhead costs rose drastically if the annual use of a two-plow tractor fell below 1,000 hours a year. The over-all spread in costs was very wide, ranging from $10 per day if the tractor was operated less than 300 hours, down to $2.50 a day for 1,800 hours of use a year. Average minimum-use levels per year for other implements: disk harrows, 200 acres, once over; tractor mowers, 100 acres; pickup hay baler, 150 tons; combine harvester, 100 acres; corn picker, 75 acres.

That a great many farmers realize the necessity for getting greater use out of their machines is clear from other surveys. The trend to bigger farms and more intensive farming is evident even in the relatively unmechanized South. A recent study of sixty-one Georgia farmers showed that after introduction of tractor power, nearly half increased their acreage and thirteen others cultivated more of what they had. Total cultivated acreage increased by more than 40 per cent while double-cropping nearly tripled, upping the total of harvested acres by 65 per cent.

How far and how much?

Such increases naturally raise the question as to how far mechanization can go, economically. Here and there in the U.S. large-scale operators appear to have pushed mechanization to its present limits. Two examples will indicate how the economy of farm machines can vary at even this stage. Both are so big that they can be called farms only by courtesy; they are big little businesses.

Consider first the 11,000-acre farm of Saul Camp, a son of North Carolina who settled near Bakersfield, California, twenty-five years ago to raise cotton. He and his son James and a staff of twenty-five are running a business now grossing around $8 million a year in cotton, sugar beets, potatoes, hay, and a feeder-lot operation that handles 40,000 head of cattle annually. The Camps employ more than 350 pieces of wheel-mounted farm equipment worth some $250,000, including fifty heavy-duty tractors, three $4,000 sugar-beet harvesters, and eleven of International Harvester’s cotton pickers costing $9,000 each. In addition the Camps have installed a sixty-seven well irrigation system, invested $100,000 in a mill for processing cattle feed, and $1 million in a new cotton-seed oil mill. Thanks to California’s weather, their farm machines can be operated all year; many of their tractors, for example, are used well over 5,000 hours annually.

The Camps grow and harvest their crops with only about 500 fieldworkers. But the continuous use of the machines in their tough California soil chews up tools so fast that maintenance costs offset much of the laborsaving and are enough to stagger any farmer east of the Rockies. Practically every machine the Camps buy is rebuilt, strengthened, and toughened before it goes on the field. Nevertheless, wear and tear cuts tractor life to 3,000 hours and on an elaborate mechanism like a cotton picker repairs have run up to $4,000 per machine per year. Despite such costs, profit margins on the Camps’ crops are good—around 10 per cent.

Now consider the operations of Charles F. Seabrook and his three sons, who run a 15,000-acre truck-garden business on the sandy flats of southern New Jersey. The Seabrooks have carried mechanization right through to the processing of frozen foods, and last year their sales were over $13 million. Nine Seabrook division managers operate sixty track-type and 130 wheel tractors whose relatively easy tasks give them a life expectancy of 10,000 hours. The total investment in farm equipment amounts to more than $1 million, major items being eight new pea-and-spinach harvesters costing $4,800 each. Intensive cultivating schedules and peak harvest loads bring maintenance costs up to around 25 per cent of the cost of new equipment. The Seabrooks hire up to 3,500 workers and although increased mechanization in the last two years has cut the number of fieldworkers in half, 700 are still needed for picking, weeding, and cutting jobs for which no machines are yet—or may ever be—available.

In this kind of farming, operating costs are so critical that Seabrook accountants figure them out daily, and by midnight each manager has a tabulated report showing how his costs compare with those in other divisions. Before planting, a staff climatologist calculates rates of maturity on crops, assuring a harvest schedule geared to Seabrooks’ processing equipment. This makes for lower costs and uniform quality of product, both of which are essential to profitable operations. On the pea crop, sold for 5 cents a pound, direct costs run around 3 cents, yet net profit averages less than two mills, or about 5 per cent. For the Seabrooks, the rewards of mechanization are a very slim but certain profit.

Integration: early signs

The present economic problems of farm mechanization are a measure of what remains to be done for agriculture. Many of them would disappear if farm processes were integrated, and before that can happen many ancient farming ideas will have to be scrapped. But the start toward integration has been made, and the evidence appears in such developments as these:

• Stubble mulching, i.e., churning the crop trash into the topsoil with a harrow or chisel-type plow, has made the moldboard plow outmoded on millions of acres in the old Dust Bowl.

• At its tillage laboratory in Auburn, Alabama, the Department of Agriculture is working on the fundamental relationship between soil and tools, and the efficiency of both tire treads and earth-working implements is being tested in nine strips of different soils common to the Southeast.

• At its Stoneville, Mississippi, cotton research laboratory the U.S.D.A. has developed a planter-cultivator that performs all operations through planting except the original ground breaking, eliminating three common steps (double-disking, dragging, and harrowing).

• A California farmer, Albert Jongeneel, inventor of the first sugar-beet harvester successful in California, which is now used to produce 65 per cent of the state’s crop, has turned to inventing tools that will help offset the damage that intensive mechanized farming has wrought in certain U.S. areas. In addition to his mammoth “sucker-upper” for collecting seeds (see page 95), he is working on a planter that he hopes will make it possible to sow row crops in stubble mulch and thus enable the soil-conserving practice of mulch farming to spread.

• In Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Ohio, farmers in the last year have held “Farm Transformation Day” to demonstrate the application of conservation practices. Rolling out tractors, bulldozers, and other machinery, they make over a farm in one day, changing, among other things, fields, woods, and watercourses.

• The Doane Agricultural Service of St. Louis, biggest and oldest (twenty-nine years) of professional farm-management companies, is making time studies of various machines, to arrive at the proper relationship between hours of use, capital investment, labor costs, yields, crop prices, etc. Doane engineers have also developed flexible and portable farm structures—for example, a barn that can be used for hay, cattle, sheep, or farm equipment and an open shed that can be moved from field to field as pasturage is rotated.

Laborless barn

Perhaps the most striking exhibition of what can be accomplished by redesigning farm structures has been provided, not by a farmer, but by an investment banker, Paul Mazur, a Lehman Bros. partner. Mazur brought to an ordinary run-down farm in southern New Jersey a highly challenging mind, a profound knowledge of the American economy, and total ignorance of practical farming. He came prepared to admire and enjoy the wonders of farm machinery and wound up with the conviction that industry still had a lot to do for the farmer. And what was more, that industry had not only a greater market in the farmer than it had ever realized but a very direct stake in keeping farmers, the only other group of enterprisers with enough votes to count, strongly in the enterprise column. With this in mind, Mazur hit upon an idea at once startlingly simple and wholly revolutionary.

Working closely with agricultural engineers at Rutgers University, and with the help of his ingenious manager, Mazur by trial and error got what was in essence simply one barn straddling a smaller one, with hay feeding by gravity between the outer and inner shell. This has emphatically demonstrated its worth; last year only two hours of labor were required to keep hay feeding through the barn properly. Having proved his idea, Mazur turned the project over to Rutgers as a research grant. To make the barn practical for the small grassland farmer, Mazur decided to experiment with prefabricated construction. He approached the Stran Steel Division of Great Lakes Steel Corp., which had his idea checked and approved by a farm consultant from the Doane Service. Great Lakes promptly engineered and donated the new double-Quonset model, shown on page 100. A second manufacturer has also seen future commercial possibilities in Mazur’s barn: for the air blowers that use engine heat for drying the hay, Continental Motors has supplied motors like those used in wind tunnels.

The significance of the Mazur barn lies in the approach. Coming to farming with no fixed ideas, Mazur analyzed the over-all problem starting with the relative economic advantages and disadvantages of a farmer in the Northeast. The soil dictated grass as the crop, the crop dictated livestock. The individual problems were then tackled simultaneously—soil, fertilizers, grasses, cutting methods, curing techniques, handling equipment, and finally effective storage and efficient feeding—all to the end of getting grass into animals twelve months a year by the most efficient system that research, engineering, and industry could devise. That is what is meant by integration, or rather the approach to it, and it can, indeed, bring American agriculture into its golden era.

*Farm-equipment sales: International Harvester ($292 million); Deere & Co. ($212 million); Allis-Chalmers Co. ($132 million, including industrial tractors); Massey-Harris ($84 million); J. I. Case & Co. ($81 million); Oliver Corp. ($74 million); Minneapolis-Moline Corp. ($51 million).

*Some recent examples of farmers’ inventions: the buck rake, the field baler, the sugar-beet digger, the high-clearance tractor.