80 years ago this week. Director of Agriculture L.J. Taber visited the Farmdale creamery, where the marl process of precipitation has been installed to do away with stream pollution. It is expected that this system will be installed at every Ohio creamery in the course of time.
Trumbull County wheat producers growing Trumbull wheat saw yields ranging from 17 bushels per acre up to 40. H.S. Sheldon of Gustavus, champion wheat grower, raised 60 bushels from an acre and a half.
The National Grange is offering life insurance – without regard to where the policy holder lives, his age or physical condition – for $1.80 per year. No medical examination is needed. In the case of a death, the National Grange will pay promptly to the beneficiary the full amount, $150.
50 years ago this week. Industry and other urban enterprises have attracted more than 30 million people away from farming since the early 1930s – enough to duplicate the 25 largest cities in the United States, according to Federal Reserve Bank.
Mass movement was by no means a one-way migration. Millions of city people in the meantime also yielded to a desire to be “gentlemen farmers.” Likewise, births have exceeded deaths in rural areas consistently.
Yet, despite these offsetting factors, the farm population has been reduced by one-fifth in less than two decades. In general, the farmer stands to profit by an orderly decline in the rural population.
25 years ago this week. A large crowd gathered for a picnic and tour of the Kenneth and Jackie Eells Poultry Farm near Elkton, Ohio. Among the crowd were several Pennsylvania producers and representatives of firms which supply the poultry industry.
The Eells operation is a large one, with 82,000 layers at work. There is a house with 12,000 where eggs are still gathered by hand, and a three-deck house with automatic scrapers under the birds to remove manure. The new house has two decks with five birds per cage over a nine-foot pit. In this house, manure will be removed by tractor fork only once a year, at the time the house is emptied for new birds.
The new house is pole type, and 420 feet long, and everything is automated. Eggs roll out of the cages onto a moving belt, where they join a wider belt at right angles at the end. Since this house is higher than the egg room, a new carrier belt moves the eggs downhill and through the grader.
