ESSAYS FOR COLLEGE

ENGLISH

THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN AGRICULTURE 1

JAMES WILSON

THE mighty production of the farm for one third of a century has come out of an agriculture having many faults. In a large degree there has been one-crop farming; crop rotation, as practiced, has often been too short and unwise; the grasses and leguminous forage crops have been neglected, domestic animals have not sufficiently entered into the farm economy, and many dairy cows have been kept at a loss. The fertilizers made on the farm have been regarded as a nuisance in some regions; they have been wasted or misapplied by many farmers; humus has not been plowed into the ground as generally as it should have been; and in many places the unprotected soil has been washed into the streams.

This, in few words, is the historic story of agriculture in a new country; yet the course of agriculture in this country, bad as it may seem in its unscientific aspect, has had large economic justification. While pioneers, poor and in debt, are establishing themselves they have no capital, even if they have the knowledge with which to carry on agriculture to the satisfaction of the critic. They must have buildings, machinery, and live stock, even at the expense of the soil.

Millions upon millions of acres of fresh land have been coming into production faster than domestic consumption has required,

1 Reprinted from the report of the Secretary of Agriculture for the year 1906.

and, at times, beyond the takings of importing countries. For many years the farmer was threatened with forty-cent wheat, twenty-cent corn, and five-cent cotton, and at times he was face to face with the hard conditions implied in these destructive prices. A more scientific agriculture would have raised wheat that no one wanted to eat, corn to store on the farm and perhaps eventually to be used for fuel, and cotton not worth the picking.

So it has happened, with reason, that the production per acre has been low; but there is no likelihood that low production is fixed and that the farmer must continue his extensive system. When consumption demands and when prices sustain, the farmer will respond. The doors of knowledge and example are opening wider to him.

There is abundant information concerning crop rotation, the dependence of high production upon the domestic animals, concerning grasses, clover, and alfalfa, and concerning the mixing of vegetable matter with the soil. Systems of farm management and soil treatment have assumed greater importance in their effect upon production; and there is the breeding of plants, which can multiply production so as to glut the market.

If there were need to do so, the cotton farmer and planter could double the present crop of two fifths of a bale per acre, and the feat would need nothing more than demonstrated and well-understood principles of farm management. It would be no work of magic to multiply the production of cotton per acre by three to get a bale and a quarter; and, besides this, the planter has more than three times the present actual acreage in cotton readily available and awaiting his use. More than the present area of cotton can thus be grown in a threeyear crop rotation when the needs of the world demand it.

In accordance with principles demonstrated, known, and applicable, hints of which have been given, the corn crop per acre can be increased by one half within a quarter of a century,

and without any pretense that the limit has been reached. No wizard's services are needed for this, but just education.

The same statement is applicable to wheat. There is no sensible reason why half as much more wheat may not be had from an acre within less than a generation of time. It is only a question of knowledge, of education, of cultural system, and of farm management, all of which learning is and will be at the service of the farmer as he needs it.

Equally feasible is a 50 per cent increase in the crops per acre of oats, barley, rye, and buckwheat. Potatoes, instead of growing less than one hundred bushels per acre, should double their production. Wherever only six hundred to eight hundred pounds of tobacco are got from an acre, three fourths of a ton is the prospect.

Fruits, berries, and vegetables have a future too large to estimate. The cannery and the railway fast freight and refrigerator car have overcome obstacles of latitude, of longitude, and of season, and there is every indication that the farmer can supply any possible demand for these foods at home or abroad.

Farmers will learn how to feed more prolific breeds and strains of swine than the ones which they are now chiefly raising, and thus will pork and its products be increased per individual of the permanent stock of hogs. One fourth of the dairy cows of the country do not pay for their feed, and more than half of them do not return any profit; in proportion as the dairyman weighs the milk of each cow and applies the Babcock test will he increase the supply of milk, butter, and cheese. It is merely a matter of education.

Poultry is one of the steady and helpful sources of farm income. Movements are already on foot which may be expected to increase the egg production per hen by at least a dozen per year within a generation; and there are poultrymen, who are not enthusiasts, who foretell double that increase. If the hens of this year had each laid a dozen eggs more than

they did, the increased value of this product would have been possibly fifty million dollars.

The farmer will not fail the nation if the nation does not fail the farmer. He will need education to know the powers of the soil which are now hidden from him. The prospective yearly expenditure of ten million dollars for educational and research work by nation and states, with such increases as may come from time to time, must have enormous effects. There may be agricultural schools for the small children and agricultural high schools for the larger ones, and their education will be continued in the colleges.

The work of the Department of Agriculture has already had results which are valued at hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and yet the department feels that it has barely crossed the threshold of its mission of discovery and education. operating to the same end are sixty experiment stations in fifty-one states and territories, the sixty-three agricultural colleges, thousands of farmers' institute meetings yearly, many excellent agricultural periodical publications, and new instructive books. Then there is a new line of work which is so productive of results that it is constantly extending, and that is the demonstration farm, the encouragement of individual farmers to change their agriculture so as to multiply their yields and their profits and thus afford object lessons to other farmers.

Thus it appears that forces are now at work which will very considerably increase the production of the farms within a generation, and which promise to continue the increase indefinitely. He who would write the last chapter of the progress of the agriculture of this country must await the procession of the centuries.

The farmer is financially in a position now to do what he could not have done previous to the recent years of his prosperity. National welfare has been promoted by few revolutions in agricultural economics to the extent that it has been and will be promoted by ten-cent cotton. The greater part of the cotton

planters are out of their former bondage to future maintenance, and they are paying no enormous rates of interest for advancements, rates which were estimated fifteen years ago to average 40 per cent a year.

In the Middle West the prosperity of the farmers during the last half dozen years and more has advanced in such mass and with such speed that no parallel can be found in the economic history of agriculture. One of the great changes that have come over this region is the conversion of a million agricultural debtors, paying high rates of interest and finding great difficulty in procuring the wherewithal out of prices much too low, into financially independent farmers, debt free and begging the banks to receive their savings at as small a rate of interest as 2 per cent.

Farmers are using their new capital to abolish the waste places of the land. The river is leveed and alluvial bottoms subject to overflow become worth hundreds of dollars per acre for vegetables; a marsh is drained by ditches and tiles, and celery makes it the most valuable land in the country; semi-arid land is constantly cultivated so as to make a mulch of finely pulverized earth on the surface, and the crops that it will grow make the farmer prosperous; durum wheat or alfalfa is introduced and again the semi-arid wastes are made to do the will of the cultivator; leguminous plants give humus and nitrogen to the sandy waste, to the use and profit of the farmer; the unused rocky, stony field or mountain side, offensive to both the economic and the aesthetic eye, blossoms with the apple, the peach, the pear, and the plum, and adds to the evidences that every square foot of the land may be made productive unless it is arid; and even then irrigation works, as far as water is available, swell the evidence. Along all of these lines of production farmers are using their newly acquired capital and are progressing as never before in their prosperity.

Formerly there was an abundance of farm labor and a dearth of farming capital; now these conditions are reversed, and labor