POWER FARMING IN ITS INFANCY.
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With a Factory Designed to Turn Out a Million Agrimotors a Year, Mr. Henry Ford's Views on the Possibilities of Power Farming are Most Interesting.
WE have already, in the columns of this journal, reviewed Mr. Henry Ford's book entitled " My Life and Work," but, as it seems to 11.13, that important section of our readers who are interested in power-farming would like to know something of Mr. Ford's ideas upon the development and the use of the agrimotor. • As it happens, Mr. Ford was brought into the automobile industry through his interest in farming . coupled with his love of mechanics. He was born on a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, and he says it is his earliest recollection that, considering the results, there was too much work in the place, and that is the way he still feels about farming. When he was 12 years old, there occurred the biggest event of his earliest years and one which was largely destined to mould his career.
He had often seen portable plants, consisting of an engine and boiler mounted on wheels with a watercart and a goal-cart, drawn by horses from place to place, and used for driving threshing-machines and sawmills. One day, driving along the road, he saw one of these engines coming towards him which had a chain connecting the engine and the rear wheels of the wagonlike frame upon which the boiler was mounted. The man who was standing on the platform behind the boiler shovelled in the coal, managed the throttle, and did the steering. It was made by Nichols, Shepard, and Co., of Battle Creek. Before his father (who was driving) knew what he was up to, young Ford was off the wagon and talking to the engineer !
Ford's First Sight of a Power-driven Road Machine.
The engineer was very glad to explain the whole affair, for he was proud of it, and be showed how the chain was disconnected from the propelling wheel and a belt put on to drive other machinery. The engine crankahaft turned at 260 r.p.m., and the chain pinion could be shifted to let the wagon stop while the engine was still running. Mr. Ford points out that this last is a feature which, although in different fashion, is incorporated in all modern automobiles. It may not have been important with steam-engines which are easily stopped and started, but it became B30 very important with the internal-combustion engine using petrol as fuel. Mr. Ford made models of this portable plant, and when he was 16 years old managed to get a chance to run one of the actual vehicles.
He eventually came to the conclusion, after a lot of experimenting, that the idea of running a road vehicle by steam would have to be abandoned and, becoming interested in the gas-engine, gradually developed the Ford motorcar, to be followed later by the Fordson tractor. The tractor had always been in his mind, but he did not see any future for a large machine. It would be too expensive for the small farmer, required too much skill to operate, and was too heavy as compared with the pull exerted, but when the Ford motorcar was in production and in very general use by farmers, the tractor became a necessity, for then the farmers had been introduced _ to power.
The Farmer's Need is for Power.
To quote Mr. Ford's own words: " The farmer does not stand so much in need of new tools as of power to run the tools that be has. I have followed many a weary mile behind a plough and I know all the drudgery a it. What waste it is for a human being to spend hours and days behind a slowly moving team of horses when, in the same time, a tractor could do six times as much work! It is no wonder that, doing everything slowly and by hand, the average farmer has not been able to earn more than a bare living, while farm products are never as plentiful and cheap as they ought to be."
Mr. Ford points out that, as in the automobile, power is wanted —not weight. The weight idea; was firmly fixed in the minds of tractor makers. It was thought that excess weight meant excess pulling power —that the machine could not grip unless it were heavy. And this in spite of the fact that a cat has not much weight and is a pretty good climber. The only kind of tractor that Mr. Ford thought worth working on was one that would be light, strong, and so simple that anyone could run it. Also it had to be so cheap that anyone could buy it.
With these ends in view, the Ford staff worked for nearly fifteen years on a design and spent some millions of dollars in experiments. They followed exactly the same course as with the automobile. Each part had to be as strong as it was possible to make it, and the parts had to be few in number, and the whole had to admit of quantity production. ' "We had, some thought," says Mr. Ford, "that perhaps the automobile engine might be used, and we conducted a few experiments with it. But, finally, we became convinced that the kind of tractor we wanted and the automobile had practically nothing in common. It was the intention from the beginning that the tractor should be made as a separate undertaking from the automobile and in a distinct plant. No plant is big enough to make two articles.
"The automobile is designed to carry ; the tractor is designed to pull—to climb," continues Mr. ford. "And that difference in function made all the differ once in the world in construction. The hard problem was to get bearings that would stand up against the heavy pull. We finally got them and a construction which seems to give the best average performance under all conditions. We fixed upon a four-cylinder engine that is started by gasoline, but runs thereafter on kerosene. The lightest weight that we could attain with strength was 2,425 lb. The grip is in the lugs on the driving wheels—as in the claws of the cat."
Ninety-five Uses for the Agrimotor
In addition to its strictly pulling functions, the tractor, to be of the greatest service, had also, in Mr. Ford's opinion, to be designed for work as a stationary engine, so that, when it was not out on the road or in the fields, it might be hitched up with a belt to run machinery. In short, it had to be a compact, versatile power plant. And that it has been. It has not only ploughed, harrowed, cultivated and reaped, but it has also threshed, run grist mills, sawmills, and various other sorts of mills, pulled stumps, ploughed snow, and done about everything that a plant of moderate power could do from sheepshearing to printing a newspaper. It has been fitted with heavy tyres to haul on roads, with sledge runners for the woods and ice, and with rimmed wheels to run on rails. When the shops in Detroit were shut down by coal shortage, the Dearborn independent was got out by sending a tractor to the electrotyping factory—stationing the tractor in the alley, sending up a belt four storeys, and making the plates by tractor power. Its use in ninety-five distinct lines of service has been called to the attention of the Ford Co., and probably they know only a fraction of the uses.
Mr. Ford. goes on to show that the mechanism of the tractor is even more simple than that of the automobile, and it is manufactured in exactly the same fashion. Until the present year the production has been held back by the lack of a suitable factory. The first tractors had been made in the plant at Dearborn, which is now used as an experimental station. That was not large enough to effect the economies cd large-scale production and it could not well be enlarged because the design was to make the tractors at the River Rouge plant, and that, until this year, was not in full operation.
Now that plant is completed for the making of tractors, the work flows exactly as with the automobiles. Each part is a separate departmental undertaking and each part, as it is finished, joins the conveyor systetn which leads it to its proper initial assembly and eventually into the final assembly. Everything moves, and there is no skilled work; The capacity of the _present &sot is one million tractors a year. That is the number Fords expect to make—for the world needs inexpensive, general-utility power plants more now tharr ever before—and also it now knows enough about machinery to want such plants.
Effect of Scientific Production on Price.
The first of the Ford tractors went to England in the autumn of 1917. They were first offered in the United States in 1918 at 750 dollars. In the next year with the higher costa, the price had to be put at, 885 dollars • in the middle of the year it was possible again dollars; make the introductory price 750 dollars. In 1920 Fords charged 790 dollars • in the next year they were sufficiently familiar with the production to begin cutting. The price came down to 625 dollars, and then. in 1922, with the River Rouge plant functioning, they were able to cut to 395 dollars "All of which," says Mr. Ford, "shows what getting into scientific production will do to a price. Just as I have no idea how cheaply the Ford automobile can eventually be made, I have no idea how cheaply the tractor can eventually be made."
" It is important, that it shall be cheap," affirms Mr. Ford. " Otherwise power 'will not go to all the
farms. And they must all of them have power. Within a few years, a farm depending solely on horse and hand power will be as much of a curiosity as a factory run by treadmill. The farmer must either take up power or go out of business. The cost figures make this inevitable. During the war the United States Government made a test of a Fordson tractor to see how its costs compared with doing the work with horses. The figures on the tractor were taken at the high price plus freight. The depreciation and repair items are not so great as the report sets them forth, and, even if they were, the prices are cut in halves, which would, therefore, cut the depreciation and repair charge in halves. These are the figures :— FORDSON, COST 880 DOLLARS. WEARING LIFE, 4,800 HOURS AT 4-5 ACRES PER Houn, 3,840 ACRES. Dollars 3,840 acres at 880 dollars; depreciation per here .221 Repairs for 3,840 acres, 100 dollars; pe.T. acre 026
•••
Fuel cost, kerosene at 19 cents ; 2 gal. per acre .38 gal. oil per 8 acres; per acre ... .075 Driver, 2 dollars per day, 8 acres ; per acre ... .25 Cost of ploughing with Fordson ; per acre
EIGHT HORSES, COST 1,200 DOLLARS. WORKING LIFE, 5,000• HOURS AT 4-5 ACRES PER HOUR, 4,000 ACRES. 4,000 acres at 1,200 dollars ; depreciation of
horses, per acre ,.30 Feed per horse, .40 cents (100 working
days), per acre''. .40 Feed per horse, 10 cents a y (265 idle
e
days), per acre .265 Two drivers' two gang ploughs, at 2 dollars
each per day, per acre .„ .50
Cost of ploughing with horses, per acre At present costs, ploughing would cost about 40 cents per acre, only 2 cents representing depreciation and repairs. But this does not take account of the time element. The ploughing is done in about one-fourth the time, with only the physical energy used to steer the tractor. Ploughing has become a matter of motoring across a field.
How Power Removed Drudgery from the Farm.
Farming in the old style, so Mr. Ford thinks, is rapidly fading into a picturesque memory. This does not mean that work is going to be removed from the farm. Work 'cannot be removed from any life that is productive. But power-farming does mean this—drudgery is-going to be removed from the farm. Power-farming is simply taking the burden from flesh and blood and putting it on steel. We are in the opening years of power-farming. The motorcar wrought a revolution in modern farm life, not because it was a vehicle, but because it had power.
"Farming ought to be something more than a rural occupation, says Mr. Ford. "It ought to be the business of raising food. And, When it does become a business, the actual work of farming the average sort of farm can be done in twenty-four days a year. The other days can be given over to other kinds of business. Farming is too seasonal an occupation to engage all of a man's time. As a food business, farming will justify itself if it raises food in sufficient quantity and distributes it under such conditions as will enable every family to have enough food for its reasonable needs. "We shall have as great a development in farming during the next twenty years as we have had in manufacturing during the last twenty."