Salt Lake Tribune | 1918-08-18 | Page 29 | Tractor Laughs at Labor Shortage

Tractor Laughs at Labor Shortage iii'mm mm m. WtXmmSS :m S -I mrmmmm t : : Jftsfo. iis-jSs;;;' ;?s--j : K?;: ! ss . Also helps save food for forty million people that animals now consume, say Landes & Co. Two billion dollars is the cost every year to the farmers of the United States to maintain three billion dollars' worth of horses and mules for their farm work. This is one reason why the motorization motoriza-tion of the farm should take place just as rapidly as possible. "When it comes to spending two-thirds the value of your power plant every year to keep running, it is high time to see where improvements can be made for economy. Some statisticians say the horse and mule power of American farms is costing cost-ing more than two billion. That would be only $80 a head for the 25,000,000. This is too low an estimate. They say $100 a head would be more nearly correct. cor-rect. That is not the worst of it. These 25,000,000 horses and mules are consuming con-suming some millions of tons of food that human beings need food that should go into our markets and across the seas to our boys at the front and our allies. Nearly one-fourth the total cultivated acreage of the United States is required to feed our work animals. The food supply of these animals would maintain 40,000,000 people the population popula-tion of France! There is not enough animal power on any farm to meet the need. Our enterprising enter-prising farmers saw this a year ago. That is why the farmers have over 1,500,000 automobiles, about 100,000 tractors, close to 2,000,000 gas engines and thousands of motor trucks. This enormous and rapidly increasing engine power is one of the solutions of the labor shortage. That is a more acute problem than ever this year. The farmer who has to depend on horses will be at a marked disadvantage against his neighbor whose tractor goes on the job with the first favorable ground and weather conditions whose powerful machine and gangs of plows do in hours the work for which horse-drawn horse-drawn equipment requires days. And don't forget the tractor can work twenty-four hours a day if necessary, and eats only when it works. The Motor Planter and Motor Cultivator Culti-vator will send the power farmer ahead by leaps and bounds. He will continue his lead at harvest time, when the tractor trac-tor does his threshing, his silo filling and a score of other jobs and he will be so far ahead that there is no hope of catching up with him when it comes to hauling his crops to market with the tractor as his locomotive. There is no reason why even the farmer of small acreage should not have a tractor today. With a. size tractor for every size farm and kind of farm work, from 5-10 horsepower to 40-80 horsepower with Motor Planter and Cultivator pulling in and caring for row crops rapidly and efficiently, any farmer can come pretty nearly declaring his indctjendenee of the farm situation this year if he takes steps to get his power machine in time. Through wise government adjustment, it now appears that the mauufacturers of motor farming machinery will be able to increase their production though it will fall far short of meeting the demand. Owing to the lack of material, ma-terial, only 55,000 tractors were manufactured manu-factured in the United States last year. It is hoped that, the production will go to nearly 100,000 this venr. But. with 6.361.502 farms in the United States (U. S. census of 1910). the total output out-put is still "a drop in the bucket."