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Show Mechanical Picker Dooms Husking Bee To Romantic Past AUDUBON, IOWA.-The familiar thud of corn against the wagon bang boards is being relegated to the romantic ro-mantic past on Iowa farmlands as the machine age muscles In on old-fashioned old-fashioned corn husking bee and corn husking contests. Romanticists notwithstanding, man can't compete with the machine ma-chine when it comes to picking corn, and as a result those popular pastimes pas-times of the past are being discarded. dis-carded. A two-row corn picker can harvest har-vest 500 to 800 bushels a day while a man, working alone, can pick only 80 to 100 bushels. Mechanical corn pickers art becoming increasingly available to do the harvesting Job in the tall corn state. The number of machines has tripled tri-pled since 1939, when there were 20,029 mechanical corn pickers to harvest nine million acres of corn. Now, it Is estimated, there are more than 60,000 pickers, an average of one machine for every 158 acres of corn. Despite the invasion of mechanical mechani-cal pickers, Elmer G. Carlson, king of the nation's corn huskers In 1935 and now owner of a hybrid seed corn company here, doesn't believe the corn husking contest li gone forever. "Corn husking Is a farm sport a&d mechanical pickers do not detract from the glamor of the old-time contests," Carlson contends. He believes husking contests would be as popular as ever. His brother, Varl, whom he dethroned as national champion, agrees that the national contests should be revived. re-vived. But even the former national champions have given way to the machine age. Both use mechanical me-chanical pickers In their own cornfields! |