Harvest Brigade

Fresh from the factory, 500-wagon-red, self-propelled combines drove north with the wheat harvest last week. The roving harvest brigade was big news on the farm front. Backer of the idea was Joseph M. Tucker, shrewd U.S. vice president of Canada's largest farm-machinery manufacturers, Massey-Harris Co., Ltd. Tucker sold the War Food Administration and the Canadian Government on the idea of allocating to Massey-Harris enough engines and steel to build 500 of the self-propelled combines (see cut). The one condition: that Massey-Harris would sell the machines to operators who would agree to cut not less than 2,000 acres of wheat per machine during the 1944 season.

With the War Food Administration calling on U.S. farmers to plant 13.8 million additional acres of wheat this season, and the U.S. farmers testily questioning the sense of planting more acreage unless they could get machinery to harvest it, Tucker's idea won quick approval.

Massey-Harris Co. got the materials, and delivered most of the machines to points in Oklahoma and Texas in time to catch the bumper harvests. Last week the brigade was deep in the endless stretches of wheat in Kansas.

The brigade was far ahead of schedule. The first goal of the combine owners had been to cut one million acres, from the Southwest to the Canadian border, between spring and fall. Last week they lifted the goal to 1 1/2 million acres. Ahead spread the ripening grain in Nebraska, the still green fields of spring wheat in the Dakotas. The brigade could count on harvesting 50% more wheat because the combines had worked much more swiftly than, expected. Example: two brothers, L. D. and Joe Skinner, at Gruver, Texas, in one grueling day cut 100 acres.

The brigade works like this: A. C. Ruthenbeck, a tall, ruddy farmer from Tracy, Minn., took delivery of his combine at Enid, Okla. last month. There he began cutting 200 acres of wheat for Farmer Fred Ash. Though the stand was heavy, the yield up to 30 bushels an acre, the sturdy combine averaged five acres an hour. At that rate Ruthenbeck cheerfully figured he could cut 5,000 acres during the summer-long northward trek to his Minnesota home. At an average charge of $2 to $3 an acre, Ruthenbeck's gross will be a fat $10,000 to $15,000 for the four-month season. The combine, delivered at Enid, cost only $2,700.

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