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Abstract
Excerpts: The total small-grain acreage in North Dakota in 1938 was somewhat smaller than usual, but nearly 12,400,000 acres of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and flax were harvested. Approximately 3,150,000 man-days of labor were needed to bring in this crop. Had no combines been used, about 640,000 additional man-days of labor would have been required, an increase over actual labor use of approximately 20 percent. In 1938, one-fourth of all grain was harvested by combines, nearly 6 percent by headers, about one-tenth of one percent by miscellaneous methods, and the remainder by binders. In quantity of labor used, combines ranged from two and one-half to four times as efficient as other methods; for every man day used on a combine, from one and one-half to three additional man days of labor were required by header or binder-thresh methods to harvest the same acreage. The combine cut and threshed 25.4 percent of the small-grain acreages on the farms surveyed in 10.6 percent of the total men days needed to do the entire harvesting. A comparison between the proportion of grain cut by the methods shown, with total labor used by these methods, gave further evidence of the efficiency of combines in labor use. It is interesting that the use of combines in North Dakota represents a trend which has developed from the introduction of the first combine there, probably early in the 1920's, to the harvesting of one-fourth of all grain in 1938.