By F.H. Jeter, Extension Editor, as published in the Wilmington Star, April 23, 1945
Somewhat belatedly, it is true, the South is awakening to the fact that farming is also an engineering job. It is interesting to note that almost every day there comes word of some farmer who is beating the labor shortage by working out an engineering short cut or is building some kind of time-saving equipment. There is, for instance, the example of Bradford Hunter of Mecklenburg County, who had to topdressing his small grain with nitrate of soda this spring to produce the feed needed so badly by his dairy cows.
Mr. Hunter took the motor from his own lawn mower, fastened a belt to it and rigged up a homemade contraption to scatter the soda. He said this machine scattered the soda uniformly in a 30-feet spread and that it saved him the labor of four men. That last item is the thing that means so much right now on the farms of North Carolina and despite the fact that the early season and the dry weather has put farmers ahead about three weeks, there still is not enough labor to produce the crops which need to be produced. Men simply must devise new ways and means of doing things.
The actual fact of merely living on the farm calls for engineering skill. David S. Weaver, who handles the farm engineering work of the Agricultural Service, tells me that he has over 396 different building plans or blue prints for buildings, which are in constant demand by farmers of North Carolina.
Among these plans are 56 designs for farm homes, 17 different kinds of general purpose barns, 37 different dairy barns, 10 implement sheds, 15 hog equipment plans, 16 separate plans for poultry houses, 12 milk houses, and so on down the list of blue prints covering plans for almost everything that needs to built on a farm. He says that not a day passes without his getting a request from a county agent or a farmer for one or more of these plans. Of course, there is not so much building as in normal times. However, the man who can cut his own lumber and use old pieces of equipment can go ahead and construct service buildings. Farm agents in 89 North Carolina counties report that last year there were 4,399 buildings constructed, nearly 5,000 dwellings and about 7,000 other farm buildings remodeled in their counties.
The matter of rebuilding and repairing farm buildings is not the only engineering activity of farming people in this state. They are coming to use more machinery and will increase this usage as more machinery become available. In the meantime they have had to do with that on hand and should be kept in mind that farm machinery gets unusually hard wear in North Carolina. This is due to the surface of the land, the nature of the soil and the ridge type of cultivation followed over most the state.
A greater part of the skilled labor which was trained in the use of machinery now is either in manufacturing plants or driving tanks and bull-dozers on far-flung battle fronts. The unskilled labor left does not handle this equipment in the most efficient way and the owner is constantly called upon to do an engineering job in his own shop. Field demonstrations and clinics held in all parts of the state in cooperation with local farm machinery dealers have done much to improve the maintenance practices so that the machines could be operated with less cost to the owners.
In addition to being an engineering expert in handling his farm machinery, the North Carolina farmer must always face the great question of soil conservation and drainage. There are 41 county soil conservation associations in which the farmer members have bought tractor equipment to build terraces at cost so as to save their lands. The entire piedmont section is so organized and while many of these associations did not function last year due to the increased support given to terracing by the Agricultural Adjustment Agency, much terracing was done. For instance, the county unit in Cabarrus County built 443,803 feet of terraces on 1,626 acres of 58 different farms.
Since it was organized in 1941, this Cabarrus unit has been used by farmers to construct nearly 3 million feet of terraces on about 9,000 acres of land in the county. Along with this engineering work with terraces, other good soil saving practices such as contour plowing has been followed.
As with terracing, so has interest in farm drainage increased in the last few years. Eastern Carolina farmers say that it is almost impossible now to maintain the old-style open ditches due to a lack of labor available for this type of work. As a consequence, they are turning to tile drainage and this, in turn, is really an engineering problem.
Also, as the summers continue to be dry, many farmers are installing irrigation systems. They say that controlled distribution of water has proven profitable almost everywhere it has been given a trial, and there are instances of truck growers who have become well-to-do, if not actually wealthy by installing such systems.
The coming of electrical current to the farms of the state is setting up additional engineering problems. Farmers plan to expand their use of the current when the war is over. Feed mills, freezer units, hay driers, water systems, electrical milkers and hundreds of other labor-saving devices will be installed on the farms of this state. Those sons and brothers now in the armed services are learning about machinery and it is predicted that they never again will be content to do farming the hard way when they know there is an easier and a more profitable way. They are looking to engineering to make rural life really worth living and so it seems now that farming has joined the ranks of the engineering profession in which the quite pastoral scene of another day will gradually disappear forever.
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