Harvest days are over. The Winter wheat is sown. We had a
wonderful Fall. They are over now. They were the prelude to another
season. Fall plowing may be the order of some. It is different now,
we used to turn on one furrow at a time and prided ourselves on it
being straight, now it is 2 or more furrows at a time and I guess
they are straight enough. It was healing to your soul to behold a
went with it.
It was fascinating to follow the plow and watch the flow of the
land in the furrow. The furrow seemed alive. The plow is man’s
greatest implement. Ploughing goes so smoothly and quietly. It is
the finest art of farming.
It was not always so. In some of the Western soils the Eastern
plow had trouble scouring. The soil just clung to the mowlboard. A
blacksmith of Decatur, Illinois, made a plow of steel and he did
not need to scrape the mowlboard. This was in 1837, One man said
‘The steel plough was as important as the wheel on a
wagon’.
Every one in a while we find a man who advocates no plowing. A
few years ago a man wrote a book called, ‘Plow-mans Folly’,
he advocated throwing the plows away. He may have made a fortune on
the book but I still see folks plowing. He made little impression
on the people the plow made too deep a furrow. Man has plowed or
stirred the ground with sticks long before the history of man and
likely will be plowing long after we are gone.
We have a man who has printed at least one of the old copies of
Implement News. It is quite interesting. He has the early history
of Mr. Stevens, which is worth the price of the magazine. We most
heartily recommend this to you. The advertisement is elsewhere in
this magazine.
We were so pleased with the article written by Mr. Walter L.
Blakely in November-December issue, on firing the Leader Engine. He
had no pictures so we are publishing pictures and dimensions of the
Leader Engine in this issue.