The fanciest milking parlor of all has a machine in it called a Rotolactor. It is really a quiet, slow merry-go-round. Cows amble up a ramp and step into stalls on the gently moving platform. A man attaches milking machines to them, one after the other. By the time each cow has been carried halfway around the big circle, her milk has been pumped out into a glass tank that sits on a rack above her. A man takes off the rubber cups, a [Illustration] gate opens in front of the cow, and she steps off onto another ramp that goes from the center of the merry-go-round, underneath it and out to the barnyard. Twenty-five cows at a time can be milked on the Rotolactor. [Illustration] Automatic gadgets empty the milk from the glass tanks, wash them, sterilize them and get them ready for the next round. All the time men are busy keeping the stalls clean and tending to the machinery. Most dairies milk the cows twice a day, but the Rotolactor milks three times. MACHINES FOR EVERY JOB The Rotolactor was invented for one particular kind of huge dairy. But farmers everywhere like to have good machinery to do special jobs. For hilly country, there’s a plow that has one of its blades higher than the other so it can work on a slope. There are chisel plows that dig up hard soil by clawing at it with strong steel fingers. One farmer in Texas decided to make his tractor do the plowing all by itself, after he had driven it once around the field to give it a start. He invented a guide [Illustration] [Illustration] wheel that went ahead of the tractor in the furrow he had made. Now the guide led the tractor around in a spiral that got narrower and narrower until at last it stopped in the center of the plowed field. Another [Illustration] Texan, with a bigger field and more machines, had a larger idea. He set three tractors loose without drivers, one behind the other. Away they went, round and round. If one traveled too fast and caught up with the one ahead, they stopped. The only work he had to do was go out and start them up again! There have even been experiments in guiding plows by remote control radio, the way airplanes can be guided. The farmer just sits under a tree and pushes buttons in a control box. COTTON MEANS HARD WORK [Illustration] Cotton is a crop that has always taken an enormous amount of work. Even after cultivating machines were invented, men had to go through the fields twice every year and hoe out weeds around the plants by hand. One farmer rigged up a contraption that made hoeing easier. He hitched an air compressor to his tractor and ran hoses from the compressor to four special hoes. Then the escaping air jiggled the hoes in the men’s hands and saved the work of swinging them up and down. [Illustration]