Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HORSE LABOR VERSUS HUMAN LABOR A horse, intelligently handled, may be made to cheapen farm operations twenty fold over the old hand methods. Human muscle, however cheap, can never successfully compete in agriculture with improved implements, Fig. 1. Plowing: Conservation of ftuman energy and concentration of cheap energy operated by well bred-horses adapted to their work and directed by intelligent workmen. The American farmer is not usually content to direct the energies of but one horse at a time. He harnesses two, three, four, and even six, to a single implement of tillage. Inthe great wheat districts of the northwest, where the fields are often a mile long and where two plows are mounted on wheels and drawn by five horses (Fig. 1), and where ten rounds, or twenty miles, that is, forty miles of a single furrow, sixteen inches wide, is plowed in a day, a single workman accomplishes, in the pulverization and preparation of the six and a half acres, more than a hundred hand laborers could do in a day of the severest toil. Or a still more striking illustration of the economy of horse over man power may be given. In many of the great wheat-fields of California, from twenty-two to thirty-two horses are attached to a combined machine (Fig. 2) which cuts, threshes, cleans and sacks from one thousand to two thousand bushels of wheat per day. One man drives the horses and two or three others tend the machine and sew up the sacks of grain, the four spending less muscular energy than was formerly required merely to cut by hand a single acre. Nearly as great economy of human muscle is seen in the large cities, by the substitution of horses for men in the transportation of heavy merchandise, for short distances. By reason of crowded streets and cost of maintenance, only one or tw...