Essex County herald. [volume] (Guildhall, Vt.) 1873-1964, 1918-05-03

filed with earth and the new-made fields presents
a finely mulched even surface.
The tank Is not only first IL war. 1t is first in
peace. For its weight 1t has more pulling power
than any farm machine made. 1t Is the biggest
money saver and time saver ever introduced for
power purposes upon the farm. The division Of
agricultural engineering Of the University of Cali
fOrnia has found that one man with a 45 horse
power tractor on the university farm can do the
work of from three to six men with mules. More
over, the same machine may be kept going day
and night, a great advantage in California, where
1t Is necessary to get a large amount Of work done
in a short time. And it requires no feed or care
when not working.
For a varied illustration Of what a track layer
can do take the case Of the L-54, a husky little
40 horsepower tractor which has been out of the
shop for eighteen months. The writer watched
her working and learned Of her career since the
day she left the factory.
She was hauling beets when l first saw her.
Under the thrust of her powerful engines she
went forward in a cloud of dust that hid her from
all eyes but her drivers. She mounted the sides
or the levee, dragging her own weight of five and
one-half tons and two eleven-ton truckloads Of
beets as easily as If there had been no load at all.
The ground on the island Is what ranchers in
the delta Of the San Joaquin river call peat bot
tom fluff. 1t gave under like saw logs in q mill
boom as the little L-54 dragged her weight over
1t, hugging the ground as closely as a badger.
When she had reached the top L-54 stopped a mo-
ment and the driver got his bearings. Then the
gears connected with her right track, her left
track remaining stationary, and she swung around
from right to left on her own axis quite as rap
idly as a lady In the fox trOt.
This, however. was nothing for the L-54. She
can go backward or forward, up hill or down. and
can spin around all day like a dervish if her driver
throws in but one clutch. Time and again she has
picked her way over the peat Dogs of the newly
reclaimed land, skirted the edge of big cracks
six or eight feet deep, backed and sidestepped
and bridged miniature chasms, confident that
nothing short of a cave-in of the whole earth could
stop her progress and that the harrows, plows or
trucks behind were bound to follow wherever she
led.
L-54 Is a ponderous, deliberate creature with a
tremendous grip upon the earth. If covered with
sheet iron and armored she could tear her way
through wire entanglements as easily as Byng's
tanks tore through the German defenses at Cam
brai. But more than all things else she is a
money saver and a man saver.
This is all in the days work With L-54, and
nights work, too. In fact her driver can remem-
Der when she worked all day and then went at
1t at night with an a~cetylene lamp, blowing up
beets with a subsoil pillow 16 inches deep. She
has been on the job In one way or another all the
time for IS months.
She had pulled a grader holding five cubic
yards Of dirt to level the land for irrigation be-
fore a single acre had been put into beets. She
had been lent to a farmer in the nearby foothills.
He had hitched her up to n chisel- SHAPED sub
soiler that would break the hardest ground in the
district and she had subsoiled the land to a depth
Of 20 inches, breaking up the hard-plow pan
where ten span Of horses had failed. For the first
time In 25 years that land had produced 30 BUSH
els Of wheat to the acre.
When the L-54 mounted the levee with her two