Manufacturing Wheat - Part 2

How Thomas Campbell Has Revolutionized Grain Harvesting Methods on His 150,000-Acre Farm

(By Thomas Campbell)

(Cont. from last week)

“After studying Tom Campbell’s methods and his success, one well may ask: Does the real remedy for agriculture, that so many earnest advocates are now seeking. He is just around the corner, on our blind side, where the industrial secrets of America are openly revealed?

Thomas D. Campbell was born on a farm in Grand Forks County, North Dakota, in 1882. When he was seventeen years old, in the illness of his father he had complete charge of 4,000 acres of land. His father brought the first big team plowing outfit and the first steam thresher to that section of the Red River Valley, and Tom saw immediately the supreme importance of mechanical power in large-scale farming operations.
“At the age of seventeen he entered the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks, three miles from his home farm. He wanted to become a mechanical engineer, but he also wanted an academic education. So he solved that problem by entering for the two courses at once, and completed the two four-year course in five years.

The War Call for Wheat

“During the whole period at the university he continued to manage the home farm, walking the three miles night and morning so that he might be in constant contact with the job. When he graduated in 1904 with an A. B. and an M. E. degree, he entered Cornell University, at Ithaca, New York, for post-graduate engineering work. But after a few months there the continued illness of his father compelled him to return home, where he resumed the management of the farm.
“About this time young Campbell married, and in 1912 he moved with his bride to California. There he engaged in several large agricultural development project in which engineering skill was required. then came the war and the world demand for wheat and to Tom Campbell came Purely as a patriotic enterprise, the chance to put his industrial-agricultural theories to the test.

“He had made preparations to go to France, in 1917, as an officer of an engineering unit. True to his lifelong training, however, he could not forbear sending a wire to President Wilson suggesting that vast acres of idle government land could be devoted, for war purposed, to wheat.

“President Wilson referred the matter to the late Secretary of the Interior, Franklin K. Lane, who had met Mr. Campbell in California. Secretary Lane replied immediately that he thought idle Indian lands could be so used, and he begged Mr. Campbell to undertake a survey of Indian lands for that purpose, in company of the official in charge of farm lands on Indian reservations.

“The survey was made, and Campbell went to Washington in 1918 with a favorable report. He was urged by Secretary Lane to undertake the job himself, rather than enter the service in France, and a contract with the Government for the leasing of Indian lands was worked out. In justice to Mr. Campbell, criticized, as all successful men are, this little extract from war history should be understood.

“In the fall of 1918 he put 7,000 acres into winter wheat, and the drought of 1919 took most of his crop. The second year he put 45,000 acres into crop, and the market collapse of 1920 brought financial loss. The third year he had 55,000 acres in crop, and in 1921 the grasshoppers descended in myriads upon the Fort Peck reservation and completely destroyed 15,000 acres of growing wheat.

“Each year since then he has made money on his farming operation. In 1923, reducing his operations temporarily, he had 24,000 acres in crop. In 1924 he had 32,000 acres, and 35,000 acres in 1925. This year he has 48,000 acres in crop.
“If one were to attempt to recount all the lessons about dry farming in of semiarid country that may be learned from Tom Campbell’s methods, the story might continue interminably. But there are some outstanding industrial principles and farming practices that can not be omitted. Let us divide the two and discuss first the principles, of which there the essentially four.
“First, of course, is Tom Campbell’s insistence that wheat growing in the semiarid regions must be conducted in a large way to be conducted economically.
“His own operations are conducted in units of 10,000 acres, as nearly as possible.

Skilled Labor and Big Machines

“Second, of course, is Tom Campbell’s conviction that dry farming must be done with power machinery, and in the largest units possible.
“With 35,000 acres in crop last year and half as much or more in summer fallow, the following tractors wear used: six mammoth 75 H.P. Caterpillars, twenty-three enormous 40’s, ten 22-40’s, and ten small tractors of 10-20 H.P., used only for switching purposes around the farm.

“Other machinery used included twenty-five ten-bottom fourteen-inch gang plows, thirty ten-foot disks, sixty twelve-foot disk drills, seventy-two eight-foot binders, seven combines, eight stationary threshing machines, and 200 grain wagons holding 20 bushels apiece. The total investment in machinery and improvements is about thirteen dollars per acre.
“In power farming of this character, skilled labor is essential. That brings us to the third of Tom Campbell’s industrial principles: Employ skilled helpers and few of them; pay big wages for better work and reduce the cost of production.
“On the largest engines he pays a minimum wage of six dollars a day; on the other large engines five dollars a day; and the lowest wage paid on the farm is a minimum of four dollars a day to common labor.
“Not the word minimum. In addition there is a bonus of ten cents per mile, according to the work performed.

Run on Railroad Schedule

“Men don’t walk on this farm; they run. The work day averages about twelve hours in the busy season, and the machines never stop if the operators can possibly help it. Repairs are made at night, because the machines positively must start on time, like a railroad train, in the morning.

There is a fourth of Tom Campbell’s industrial principles that is yet to be mentioned. That is factory cost accounting. Every operation on the farm is as carefully recorded, and the figures studied, as in the most modern industrial organization in the land.
“And now we come to Tom Campbell’s farming practices.

“For the first crop the land is plowed and disked. For the second crop it is not plowed, but is double-disked. Spreading and disking in the straw in the fall helps to conserve moisture, return hums to the soil, and the second crop is as good as the first.
“Plowing on the Campbell farm costs two dollars per acre, and disking about thirty cents. Hence he saves nearly two dollars per acre by eliminating the second plowing. On a small farm the saving would be nearer three dollars.
“When the second crop is removed for summer fallow he disks the land immediately to conserve fall rains. It is disked again early in the spring and then left fallow until about the middle of May, when there is a heavy growth of volunteer wheat and weeds. Then it is plowed six inches deep for green manure, and the plowing is continued as long as there is moisture enough to plow.

Better Crops From Less Seed

“During the summer the plowed land is harrowed lightly to conserve moisture and kill the weeds. It is seeded about the fifteenth of September. He seeds only twenty pounds to the acre, Russian Kharkov winter wheat, and gets a better crop than with the heavier seeding.

“With less seed he maintains every stalk has a chance at the available moisture and plant fod, and will mature a full head of grain. He is convinced that if he had sown twenty pounds of seed instead of forty-five pounds in 1919, the year of the great drought, he would have had a crop in spite of the lack of rainfall.
“This twenty pounds to the acre, be it marked, is for the first crop only. For the second crop he seeds only ten pounds.
“It is this practice of early and light seeding, combined with his tillage methods, that makes Tom Campbell supremely confident that he will never have a complete drought failure again.

“He has worked out a method whereby the combine can be used on all the corp at all times.
“He takes old binders, removes the carrier or conveyor in place of the binder head and attaches an extension bundle carrier. Four of these binders are operated in a string, offset behind one another in the standing grain. The first machine drops the cut grain, unbound in a windrow as close to the binder frame as possible. The succeeding binders, with conveyors of increasing length, carry the cut grain to the same windrow.

Threshing Costs Reduced

“When grain is matured the combine comes into play. Although a hay loader can be used, Campbell has devised a special loader which is attached to the combine. As the machine moves over the field, the grain is picked up from the windrow, threshed and deposited in a grain wagon.

“By this method the cost of harvesting and threshing on the Campbell farm has been reduced to two dollars per acre.
“He says that this method of harvesting is applicable to any grain farm of 160 acres or more. It will take about half as many men to harvest the crop as it now takes to shock the bundles, and the grain will be threshed and put in the grain box for just about the present cost of twine and shocking.

“One might think that a wheat grower of Tom Campbell’s calibre would have no interests in such a subject as co-operative marketing. But his eyes glisten when he talks of what the Western Canadian farmers have done with their wheat pool.
“If American wheat growers ever reach that stage of co-operative action, it might be worth while to remember that there is one farmer in America whose experience is wide enough to take a leading part in the conduct of such an enterprise.” Print this post