Cane-Cutter?

Since 1795, when Louisiana's Etienne de Bore grew the first U.S. sugar cane for commercial use, cane crops have been harvested, like cotton, by hand. Negroes mow their way through the cane fields with knives like tropical machetes. Efforts have been made to mechanize the reaping of both cotton and sugar. Several cotton-pickers have been invented which have proved that they can pick cotton, but their practical efficiency and adaptability have been seriously disputed, and they have so far made no visible inroads on the South's labor economy.

In Louisiana last week a privately financed machine harvester made its appearance, proved that it could cut sugar cane. It was invented by Allan Ramsey Wurtele, a onetime navy officer and chief engineer of the Federal Barge Lines, who put it together on his sugar plantation in Pointe Coupee parish. Built of steel channel beams welded to a tractor, the machine has hydraulically adjusted, sharp-edged disks which cut the cane at top and bottom, handling 15 to 20 tons of cane per hour, has four-inch rubber cleats on its tires which enable it to negotiate deep mud. According to one eyewitness report, it "cut sugar cane from ten to twelve feet tall . . . stripped it, topped it, bunched it in piles and collected in separate piles the tops for stock feed." Inventor Wurtele claims that it does the work of 50 to 60 field hands.*

The Bureau of Agricultural Engineering dispatched an investigator to look over the Wurtele harvester, would venture no comment whatever as to its practicability pending his report. If the machine should prove practical and come into widespread use, it would affect mainly the labor economy of Florida and Louisiana, which between them account for almost all the raw cane sugar (400,000 tons last year) raised in the U.S. proper.

*Another Louisiana machine cutter has been invented by Joe Munson of Houma, who claims it will do the work of 125 humans.

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