Crops

At mid-September the farmer pauses an instant in his harvest race against crop-withering frosts, to consider his year. Spring broke tardily everywhere in the U. S. Summer was generally satisfactory, in spite of brief searings of drouth in the central plains and musty weather in the south. At present boll weevils and hopper fleas are damaging the cotton crop to a small extent. In the northwest and in Canada rains worry the prairie farmers, as he prepares to harvest his grains. Elsewhere crop conditions are satisfactory.

Specifically, the U. S. corn crop this year will be slightly less than last, oats less, potatoes more, hay less, wheat considerably more. The wheat crop will exceed 840,000,000 bu., whereas last season it was 669,365,000 bu.

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The biggest farm in the world, run analogously to Henry Ford's factory, is the wheat farm of Thomas D. Campbell out in the dryland region of southern Montana.

When the U. S. entered the World War, the late Franklin K. Lane, then Secretary of the Interior, was called upon by keen-eyed Mr. Campbell, who had a proposition. His idea was that untold quantities of wheat could be grown upon Indian reservation lands lying idle.

Mr. Lane, impressed, gave him contracts whereby on each 10,000 acre unit he was to turn over one-tenth of the crop to the Indians without cost. Manhattan bankers backed able Mr. Campbell financially, eventually turned the whole proposition over to him. Today his idea is embodied in the Campbell Farming Corporation, covering some 95,000 acres. This year he cultivated 38,000 acres of wheat, yielding some 500,000 bushels; cultivated 7,000 acres of flax.

And now on this vast farming factory fleets of 75 horsepower tractors plow 1,000 or harvest 2,000 acres a day. Mechanical engineers control the machine systems, and report cards on the mileage covered by each tractor are daily handed to managers, who base pay bonuses upon mileage covered. New and improved methods of disking, plowing, seeding, harvesting, threshing have taken this farm far away from story book sentimentality and made it into a highly industrialized system operating with low cost, due to mass production methods.