To keep pace with the reaper, other agricultural machines had to be invented and developed. The vast quantity of grain harvested could not be threshed by hand and the old-fashioned flail had to give way to the steam-driven threshing machine. Finally to meet the requirements of the vast western wheat fields, the combined harvester and thresher was developed which, with a crew of four men, will reap, thresh, and bag between two and three thousand bushels per day. According to statistics of the U. S. Department of Agriculture it took a man three hours and a half to produce a bushel of wheat in 1830 as against ten minutes in 1896. Surely the world owes a tremendous debt to Hussey and particularly to McCormick for introducing machinery into agriculture and starting the train of inventions which in the space of two-thirds of a century have led up to the present remarkable era of machine farming. There still remains one task of the farmer that has not yet been accomplished with unqualified success by machine. The harvesting of the corn crop is a tedious and disagreeable task and one which the farmer would only too gladly turn over to the machine. To be sure, many corn-harvesting machines have been built and put into service with more or less success, but none has reached the perfection of other classes of agricultural machinery. The difficulty lies not in the machine, but in the fact that corn is so easily beaten down by storms that at harvest time the machine seldom finds the stalks all standing up in nice straight rows. Machines must therefore be provided with means for lifting up the fallen stalks to vertical position. The stalks are cut and bound into bundles and stood up in shocks. Even more difficult than cutting and binding is the task of husking the corn. This work was always dreaded by farm hands, but now machines are provided to husk the ears and shred the stalks for fodder. Thus the farm is being relieved of its drudgery. Unfortunately it is only the large western farms that can afford to avail themselves of the latest agricultural machinery. On small eastern farms it does not pay to purchase a machine which can be used for only a few weeks in the year and then must be stored away until the next season, but small farmers are now cooperating and clubbing together to buy the less frequently used machines and so even the small farm is being relieved of its drudgery, and the arduous burdens which have always had a tendency to drive young men away from the farm are now being assumed by the unfeeling machine. CHAPTER XVI MACHINING THE EARTH