Personalities Thomas D. Campbell, Business-Farmer T HOMAS D. CAMPBELL, of Hardin, Montana, is the superpower farmer. Probably no man in the world has carried the use of mechanical energy to such a degree in the creation of food from seed and soil. This past season he farmed 35,000 acres of land in the semiarid West, and used a million dollars' worth of the highestpowerfarm machinery. With never more than 250 men on the job, he plowed, cultivated, and seeded this vast area, and harvested and threshed 380,000 bushels of wheat, 65,000 bushels of flax, and 42,000 bushels of oats. Instead of the power of muscle in the bodies to the soil to apply modern science and modern business methods to the oldest industry of civilized man. His brilliant success is a lesson that is provoking admiring study among the leaders in the farm movement, and may well point the way out of the economic morass that threatens American agriculture. THOMAS D. CAMPBELL, BUSINESS-FARMER of men and horses that usually goes into such an operation, he used the power of 200,000 gallons of gasoline. Mr. Campbell is the newest type of farmer. Born in a sod hut in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, reared on a pioneer farm in that same valley, working from childhood at the hard tasks of that life, finally he went through the University of North Dakota, took a postgraduate course at Cornell in mechanical and electrical engineering, and went back He treats farming as a manufacturing process. He regards seed and soil and rain as the raw materials of that process, and farm machinery as the machinery of a factory. He says his business is to "manufacture wheat." The first task of the manufacturer is to relate the cost of production to the possible selling value of his product; he instals an expert accountant to keep exact records of all expenditures and to analyze the records to see where the wasteful parts of his process are. Mr. Campbell did exactly that. He quickly found what all manufacturers find, namely, that the cheapest production is attained by the largest use of mechanical power to replace hand operation. He replaced men and mules with the highest-power tractors, gaining Mr. Campbell uses $1,000,000 worth of machinery on his Montana wheat ranch, including seventy-two big tractors. The picture shows fifteen tractors pulling gang plows on one operation. This outfit is able to plow a square mile a day, which is the record. speed and certainty in plowing and in all the other farm processes. He leased lands of such contour and size that machinery could be used most effectively. Then he hitched gang-plows to tractors, put fifteen tractors abreast, sent them six miles in a straight line and plowed a furrow 150 feet wide and six miles long. By this process he can plow a square mile of land in a day. Next, he had accountants figure the cost of this operation, and charged the items in such a way that they could be compared with the costs of performing the same operation with a different arrangement of men and machinery. This accounting is carried to such a refinement that he knows to the fraction of a cent the cost of lubricating oil that went into the production of every bushel of wheat. Comparative cost studies led to the following economy: For some time, it was his practice to hitch six reapers to one traction engine. The best speed the engine could make with this load was two miles an hour. By experiment he found that reducing the number of reapers to four permitted the engine to increase its speed to three miles an hour, and the smaller outfit would do as much work in a day as the larger. And of course there was a large saving of the pay of the two men on the extra two reapers, and in the cost of the reapers themselves. Along with the economy of using maximum land areas, maximum power and the minimum of men, Mr. Campbell early learned that the least expensive labor is the highest paid. He picks the most skillful workers he can get, pays them the COST ACCOUNTANTS RETOUCHED THIS PHOTOGRAPH At first Mr. Campbell used six reapers hitched to one tractor, but his accountants told him that it would be cheaper to use four. In one day last summer his crews threshed 4,321 bushels of wheat in one day, a world's record for a single outfit. 258 A Ban on Old-Style Farm Hands highest wages, and gives them a bonus based on improved performance. Engine repair men get a bonus for reducing the number of hours the engines are idle for repairs. Engine drivers get a bonus for increased mileage in plowing and reaping, and so on. For this reason, the men on the Campbell ranch regard the business as their own, and give their best skill and effort to the work. They have the inspiring leadership of the "boss" himself, who knows every detail of every task better than any of the men and can do it better. factory trade. The revolutionary effect of this attitude upon the morale of the men can readily be imagined. It helps to explain the unprecedented "per-man production" of wheat on the Campbell ranches. Manufacturers know that production, however, is only one half the story of success. Marketing is the rest. Indeed, marketing is the most grievous failure of American farming. It is probably Mr. Campbell's most brilliant success. Here he has carried business methods into farming with exceptional skill. Operat has had to obtain financial capital adequate to that scale. But he has not made the mistake that most farmers make, namely, of obtaining capital solely for production purposes, with no thought of marketing. Small wonder, then, that records are ing on such a large scale as he does, he constantly being broken on the Campbell ranches. Two were smashed this last season. One was the threshing record. With an all-steel threshing outfit in one of his fields, his men threshed and cleaned 4,321 bushels of wheat in one day. The other was the plowing record. With the fifteen tractor and gang plow outfit they plowed 640 acres in one day without stopping of the engines once. A CLEAN BUNKHOUSES FURTHER development of esprit de corps among his men is provided by Mr. Campbell. The old-fashioned "bunk house" is unknown on his lands. Instead, neat, modern buildings, with hot and cold shower baths, bedrooms furnished with white iron beds and honest-to-goodness sheets on them, provide living quarters undreamed of in the old West and rare enough in the new. Mr. Campbell insists that all his men shall shave every day, and encourages them to take a shower when the day's work is done and change their clothes. These are not merely sanitary measures; they are also psychological devices, designed to prevent the old fashioned "farm hand" attitude from creeping into the Campbell organization. Instead, every man feels himself to be what he really is, a self-respecting member of a skilled. Mr. Campbell's seasonal' financing includes the procuring of capital not only to get the crop in and to get it out, but capital also to carry the finished product in storage until the best market price can be obtained. He never confronts therefore, the almost universal dilemma of the farmer who ends the harvest with exhausted funds and must sell his crop at once for whatever ready cash it will bring. Campbell wheat is sold when the market is at its best, not when it is saturated. He also adopts the selling methods of other manufacturers, dealing direct, wherever possible, with customers, the millers. Using modern methods and grading his wheat carefully, he can guarantee a standard quality, and, therefore, get a better price. Mr. Campbell has not only achieved a great personal success-he owns (with his farm managers and principal skilled workmen as partners) his million-dollar plant outright and has a heavy cash surplusbut he has demonstrated a new method of farming. of farming. The use of power on the land is not unique, but the application of fac tory methods is-factory methods of power assembly, cost accounting, and marketing. The result of his success is that the Russian Government has offered him all the land he wants on his own terms, and many private owners of large tracts and even state governments have asked him to operate on their lands. He prefers, however, to maintain complete independence and continue as a private manufacturer of basic foods. This last year he applied his methods to flax growing, with conspicuous success. Dr. Reginald G. Harris, Biologist, W Tells Why Scientists Study Polliwogs HY do men study polliwogs?" is a question that may be answered by recounting the great advancements made in medical science by the study of marine animals or by telling just why scientists at present are dissecting the tadpole and the salamander. When that question was put to Dr. Reginald G. Harris, Director of the Long Island Biological Station at Cold Spring Harbor, he answered it in both ways-by recounting the achievements made in the past by the cooperation of polliwogs and inquisitive scientists and by telling why the tadpole is so popular now with men of science. individual and, therefore, the improvement of the human race. Scientists know that an important part in physical development is played by the pituitary gland, the thyroid and other glands in the body, and that, though duct less, they coöperate like a well-organized football team by maintaining liaison through the blood. But the why, and the how, and the wherefore, of all this cooperation constitute the mystery yet to be solved. The Watson of this mystery is the polliwog, and tadpoles have rarely failed science. The reason the marine animal is so useful in a study of the glands or internal organs is that it matures so rapidly, and there is no thick skin or hair coat to be penetrated, as in the case of higher animals. Nor is the polliwog a stickler for privacy and seclusion. With no display of temperament, the tadpole will maintain an existence just as normal in a small aquarium in a laboratory as in his DR. REGINALD G. HARRIS Director of the Long Island Biological Station at Cold Spring Harbor. An important and virtually unexplored field of science to-day is the study of the endocrine glands, their relation to the functions and development of the human body, and the compilation of data to enable the medical profession to influence these glands for the betterment of the 260 Frogs as World Figures native swamp. It will not always do what scientists expect, but an invariable trait of the polliwog is that it usually does something. Sometimes, despite its lack of temperament, it may do something startling. HOW GLANDS AFFECT GROWTH The tadpole on the left is normal, the same age as the silvery white tadpole on the right, from which the pituitary gland has been removed. Removal of the gland causes the color to change from dark to the silvery white, and retards growth so that such a tadpole never metamorphoses into a frog. For instance, when a scientist removes its pituitary gland the tadpole steadfastly refuses to metamorphose into a frog, and its normal dark color changes to a silvery white. Give it back the pituitary gland of a frog and it will change its unnatural silver color back to normal dark hue, and live up to its glands by proceeding to metamorphose into a noisy frog. By experiments of this kind, scientists at the marine biological stations. learning something about the endocrine glands. "Most persons laugh when they ask why men study tadpoles," says Dr. Harris, "but many great discoveries have come from research of this kind." The great Metchnikoff conceived the basis of his phagocyte theory while he was observing some star-fish larvæ under his microscope at Messina. He wondered whether the mobile cells. he observed would attack any intruding microbes. He put some thorns into ANOTHER GLAND EXPERIMENT The tadpole on the left has changed dark color for silvery white because the pituitary gland was removed. The tadpole on the right also lost its pituitary gland, but after the color had changed from dark to silvery white the scientists gave it back the pituitary gland of a normal frog, and the result was an acceleration of growth and a visible change toward the normal dark color. the larva; inflammation followed as the mobile mesodermic cells rushed to the attack, and he formed the theory that "inflammation is thus a creative reaction of the organism, and morbid symptoms are only the signs. of the struggle between the mesodermic cells and the microbes." Metchnikoff in early years always centered his life around a marine biological station, and he refused to take any post that was not near the sea and its smaller animals. That shows the importance of the marine biological station, or, in other words, the polliwog, in the life of a scientist interested in pathological or biological research. Among creatures most useful to mankind, the polliwog must take his place with the cow, the horse, and the dog. More books have been written about the frog than about Shakespeare, or Lincoln, or Napoleon, or, as Dr. Samuel J. Holmes put it in his book "The Biology of the Frog": Perhaps no animal, except man, has been the subject of so many scientific investigations. . . . In fact, most of what is known in certain departments of physiology is derived from study of this animal. |