1918 - Agriculture

Agriculture

Prime Minister David Lloyd George asks British women to help bring in the harvest.

Daylight saving time angers U.S. farmers as it has angered the British (see 1916). Many do not even own clocks or watches, they work from sunup to sundown, their livestock are not about to change their schedules, and dairymen must milk their cows by lantern light in order to get their product to market on the milk train. Congress will repeal the measure August 20 of next year, overriding President Wilson's veto of two bills.

More horses and mules are on U.S. farms than ever before, and farmers plant enormous acreages to oats for the animals, whose numbers will now begin to decline.

Horse-drawn wheat combines used in the Pacific Northwest with 16- and 20-foot cuts are reduced in size to 12-foot cuts for use in Kansas and other prairie states. Machines with eight- and 10-foot cuts will be introduced in the 1920s.

Harry Ferguson receives a British patent for a means of attaching a plow to a tractor (see 1914). Further patents will be issued to him from 1926 through 1929 as he develops hydraulic methods for assuring automatic depth control in tillage.

U.S. Corn Belt acreage sells for two and three times 1915 prices.