ns of
people in the cities are not yet awake to the fact that we have a new
rural civilization! When we think of the thousands of men who have
patiently experimented and labored to perfect the plow, many of them now
unknown, we must consider the modern planting machine not an individual
but a race triumph. Among these innumerable experimenters was no less a
man than Thomas Jefferson, gentleman farmer, who gave months and years of
study in nature's laboratory to the single problem of perfecting the
moldboard of the plow, that it might do the most thorough work with the
least unnecessary friction.

Likewise the harrow, so simple in our grandfathers' days, has remarkably
developed, and we have peg-tooth, spring-tooth, disk, spader and
pulverizer harrows, drawn by horses or mules, which follow the plow with a
four- to twenty-foot swath. But here again the city mechanic must tip his
hat to the prairie farmer who uses twentieth century machinery, for we
have now a harrowing machine 100 feet in reach which harrows thirty acres
in an hour or a whole section of land in about two days! These astonishing
facts are particularly staggering to the small farmer, but they need
discourage only the incompetent. They have of course combined small farms
into great enterprises, and have driven some slovenly farmers from poor
soil. The pace is so fast. But specialized farming and intensive farming
have their own successes to-day as well as extensive farming, and it all
tends to elevate the whole scale of living and standard of efficiency upon
the farms; in short producing a new rural civilization.[18]

_Power Machinery on the Modern Farm_

A most interesting chapter in the story of human industry is the evolution
of power machinery. Gradually the drudgery of hand labor has been relieved
by water power, horse power, steam power, wind power and the modern
gasolene and electricity. The giant gang-plow with its 110-horsepower
traction engine is a prairie triumph, but it has very little interest for
the ordinary farmer on an average farm. Yet even the small farmer finds
the gasolene portable engine wonderfully useful and a great labor-saver at
slight expense.

Perhaps the surest way for a farmer to interest his discontented boy, who
is crazy for the city, is to buy a gasolene engine. A machine shop on the
farm is a great educator and a great resource for the boy as well as a
money-saver for the farmer. But best of all is the portable engine,