Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

OLD-FASHIONED THRESHING OUTFIT USED NEAR CALGARY, ALBERTA. {Photo, by courtesy of the Canadian Government.) AGRICULTURAL ENGINEERING. A GRICULTURE is the greatest of all Z-X industries, as regards the number of people who busy themselves in it, and is also the most important, since on it ultimately we depend for our very existence. A single general failure of the world’s harvests would depopulate the globe, so small are our reserves of provisions. In former times, when means of distribution were undeveloped, large districts — even whole countries — suffered famine inevitably as 1he result of crops being ruined by unseasonable weather. Even to-day —witness parts of Russia, India, and China —the same evil recurs with distressing fre- quency. To make easy the distribution of food-stuffs we have built thousands of miles of railway, and constructed fleets of ships specially adapted for conveying grain The Value of anj other food-stuffs in bulk. Machinery. . . . , . Our engineers nave carried out —as noticed on previous pages—many great works for rendering cultivable large tracts which, are naturally unproductive owing to th© absence of a sufficient and well-dis- tributed rainfall. But all these achievements would be deprived of half their value had not the actual tillage of the ground and the sowing and gathering of the crops, and the preparation of the same for market, received a proportionate share of the attention of the engineer. It is true that agriculture can be, and has been for many thousands of years, conducted with the simplest of tools. But the simpler the tools the greater must be the number of persons required to use them to effect a given quantity of work ; and had we persisted in the agricultural methods of even a century ago, the proportion of persons employed on the land would be necessarily so many times greater than it is, that other industries upon which we depend for our com- fort could not have reached their present stage of development. The introduction of highly efficient agricul- tural machinery has not only relieved the labour market and cheapened the price of food-stuffs; it has also enabled the farmer to make fuller use of weather suitable for the preparation of the land and the ingathering