farmer's+market

- gospodarstwo warzywne a. warzywno-owocowe a market garden

- gospodarstwo rolnicze a farm; an arable farm spec.

- prowadzić gospodarstwo mleczne to run a dairy farm

- prowadzić gospodarstwo domowe to run a household, to keep house

- prowadzenie gospodarstwa domowego housekeeping

- □ gospodarstwo indywidualne Roln. privately owned farm

- gospodarstwo małorolne Roln. smallholding GB

- gospodarstwo stawowe Ryboł. fish farm

- gospodarstwo średniorolne Roln. a holding of 4-6 hectares

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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He was the fifth child of Charles and Ann Stalcrop Evans, and by the age of 15 he had four sisters and seven brothers. Nothing is known of his schooling, but at the age of 17 he was apprenticed to a Newport wheelwright and wagon-maker. At 19 he was enrolled in a Delaware Militia Company in the Revolutionary War but did not see active service. About this time he invented a machine for bending and cutting off the wires in textile carding combs. In July 1782, with his younger brother, Joseph, he moved to Tuckahoe on the eastern shore of the Delaware River, where he had the basic idea of the automatic flour mill. In July 1782, with his elder brothers John and Theophilus, he bought part of his father's Newport farm, on Red Clay Creek, and planned to build a mill there. In 1793 he married Sarah Tomlinson, daughter of a Delaware farmer, and joined his brothers at Red Clay Creek. He worked there for some seven years on his automatic mill, from about 1783 to 1790.

His system for the automatic flour mill consisted of bucket elevators to raise the grain, a horizontal screw conveyor, other conveying devices and a "hopper boy" to cool and dry the meal before gathering it into a hopper feeding the bolting cylinder. Together these components formed the automatic process, from incoming wheat to outgoing flour packed in barrels. At that time the idea of such automation had not been applied to any manufacturing process in America. The mill opened, on a non-automatic cycle, in 1785. In January 1786 Evans applied to the Delaware legislature for a twenty-five-year patent, which was granted on 30 January 1787 although there was much opposition from the Quaker millers of Wilmington and elsewhere. He also applied for patents in Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Hampshire. In May 1789 he went to see the mill of the four Ellicot brothers, near Baltimore, where he was impressed by the design of a horizontal screw conveyor by Jonathan Ellicot and exchanged the rights to his own elevator for those of this machine. After six years' work on his automatic mill, it was completed in 1790. In the autumn of that year a miller in Brandywine ordered a set of Evans's machinery, which set the trend toward its general adoption. A model of it was shown in the Market Street shop window of Robert Leslie, a watch-and clockmaker in Philadelphia, who also took it to England but was unsuccessful in selling the idea there.

In 1790 the Federal Plant Laws were passed; Evans's patent was the third to come within the new legislation. A detailed description with a plate was published in a Philadelphia newspaper in January 1791, the first of a proposed series, but the paper closed and the series came to nothing. His brother Joseph went on a series of sales trips, with the result that some machinery of Evans's design was adopted. By 1792 over one hundred mills had been equipped with Evans's machinery, the millers paying a royalty of $40 for each pair of millstones in use. The series of articles that had been cut short formed the basis of Evans's The Young Millwright and Miller's Guide, published first in 1795 after Evans had moved to Philadelphia to set up a store selling milling supplies; it was 440 pages long and ran to fifteen editions between 1795 and 1860.

Evans was fairly successful as a merchant. He patented a method of making millstones as well as a means of packing flour in barrels, the latter having a disc pressed down by a toggle-joint arrangement. In 1801 he started to build a steam carriage. He rejected the idea of a steam wheel and of a low-pressure or atmospheric engine. By 1803 his first engine was running at his store, driving a screw-mill working on plaster of Paris for making millstones. The engine had a 6 in. (15 cm) diameter cylinder with a stroke of 18 in. (45 cm) and also drove twelve saws mounted in a frame and cutting marble slabs at a rate of 100 ft (30 m) in twelve hours. He was granted a patent in the spring of 1804. He became involved in a number of lawsuits following the extension of his patent, particularly as he increased the licence fee, sometimes as much as sixfold. The case of Evans v. Samuel Robinson, which Evans won, became famous and was one of these. Patent Right Oppression Exposed, or Knavery Detected, a 200-page book with poems and prose included, was published soon after this case and was probably written by Oliver Evans. The steam engine patent was also extended for a further seven years, but in this case the licence fee was to remain at a fixed level. Evans anticipated Edison in his proposal for an "Experimental Company" or "Mechanical Bureau" with a capital of thirty shares of $100 each. It came to nothing, however, as there were no takers. His first wife, Sarah, died in 1816 and he remarried, to Hetty Ward, the daughter of a New York innkeeper. He was buried in the Bowery, on Lower Manhattan; the church was sold in 1854 and again in 1890, and when no relative claimed his body he was reburied in an unmarked grave in Trinity Cemetery, 57th Street, Broadway.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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A farmer's son, at the age of 17 McKay developed modifications to the existing stripper harvester and created a machine that would not only strip the seed from standing corn, but was able to produce a threshed, winnowed and clean sample in one operation. The prototype was produced in 1884 and worked well on the two acres of wheat that had been set aside on the family farm. By arrangement with a Melbourne plough maker, five machines were made and sold for the 1885 season. In 1886 the McKay Harvester Company was formed, with offices at Ballarat, from which the machines, built by various companies, were sold. The business expanded quickly, selling sixty machines in 1888, and eventually rising to the production of nearly 2,000 harvesters in 1905. The name "Sunshine" was given to the harvester, and the "Sun" prefix was to appear on all other implements produced by the company as it diversified its production interests. In 1902 severe drought reduced machinery sales and left 2,000 harvesters unsold. McKay was forced to look to export markets to dispose of his surplus machines. By 1914 a total of 10,000 machines were being exported annually. During the First World War McKay was appointed to the Business Board of the Defence Department. Increases in the scale of production resulted in the company moving to Melbourne, where it was close to the port of entry of raw materials and was able to export the finished article more readily. In 1909 McKay produced one of the first gas-engined harvesters, but its cost prevented it from being more than an experimental prototype. By this time McKay was the largest agricultural machinery manufacturer in the Southern hemisphere, producing a wide range of implements, including binders. In 1916 McKay hired Headlie Taylor, who had developed a machine capable of harvesting fallen crops. The jointly developed machine was a major success, coming as it did in what would otherwise have been a disastrous Australian harvest. Further developments included the "Sun Auto-header" in 1923, the first of the harvesting machines to adopt the "T" configuration to be seen on modern harvesters. The Australian market was expanding fast and a keen rivalry developed between McKay and Massey Harris. Confronted by the tariff regulations with which the Australian Government had protected its indigenous machinery industry since 1906, Massey Harris sold all its Australian assets to the H.V. McKay company in 1930. Twenty-three years later Massey Ferguson acquired the old Sunshine works and was still operating from there in the 1990s.

Despite a long-running history of wage disputes with his workforce, McKay established a retiring fund as well as a self-help fund for distressed cases. Before his death he created a charitable trust and requested that some funds should be made available for the "aerial experiments" which were to lead to the establishment of the Flying Doctor Service.

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