f Volume XXVII
THE CHICAGO BANKER
18
The LIVE STOCK Exchange National BANK
of CHICAGO
Volume of Business for Year 1908 Exceeded
One Billion Two Hundred Million Dollars
ment Stations and Colleges, by the Department of Agriculture and by farmers’ institutes and other agencies, the job is too big for them. When we set out to educate the children in the public schools, we do not establish one or two large ones in each state and expect them to go there. The farmer is almost as numerous, as much in need of instruction, and is unable to leave home in search of it or to absorb it through literary channels, as the child. The education must be taken to him. If all the graduates of all the agricultural collleges were sent out as missionaries to the farm, there would not be enough of them to do the work. But it is the sort of work in which every state should engage without delay.
What has to be taught is not abstruse. While high-grade farming can furnish employment for the_ best intelligence, instruction in a few simple subjects will enable the ordinary farmer to double his product. He needs to be taught how to prepare a field properly for the seed; how to select and where to get the seed that will yield the best return ; how to cultivate each crop ; how to combine stock raising with tillage ; and how to rotate his crops and preserve unimpaired the richness of his soil. On his own farm, with the material and the object lesson before him, under instruction that comes with public authority and sanction, he will be a pupil apt to learn. It is on a par with the importance of the public school. We have not yet made a beginning; but every other interest and every other item of proposed legislation might well wait until we do.
The returns of Great Britain’s Board of Agriculture show that there are less than 15,000,000 acres under the plow to-day as against 18,500,000 acres thirty-five years ago. An investigation of the decline in the agricultural population in France has disclosed two main causes. One is this same rise of prices, which sends the young to the cities because they believe that they can reach independence sooner there than on' the farm, where they must labor for years before they can put enough capital together to engage in business for themselves. The other is the temptation to indolence, extravagance and inefficiency offered by the pension system. With support given by the state to civil as well as military servants, and promised to old age unaccompanied by any other claim, men seek the comparative ease and excitement of the town in early years, believing that in age and infirmity some one élse will pay for their self-indulgence. But every nation will still learn and progress by bearing manfully the consequences of its own mistakes. They will stand or fall hereafter as heretofore according to their
own State of Rhode Island with 407 in 1900. But the education of a whole people in right methods of tillage is a stupendous task. It took England nearly fifty years to do this, with powerful agencies at command and with a control over her farmers through leasehold conditions that no one in this country possesses. She has raised her average wheat yields from 12 and 15 to upwards of 30 bushels per acre. If it should take us fifty years, we would by that time probably have doubled our population also, and barely kept pace with our necessities. But we have not yet oc-complished the mere preliminaries of such a process.
Not only have we not begun, except in a few cases so rare that they furnish striking illustrations for magazine articles and experiment station bulletins, to mend our farm methods, but the machinery by which the great body of farmers may be reached—as they must be reached if any change worth considering is to be brought about —has not yet been determined upon. While we do considerable for the boys and girls who attend them through our more than three score agricultural colleges, but little impression is made upon the bulk of all the people engaged in farming. Here are some extracts from a letter written recently by an intelligent farmer for publication : “I don’t thing one-half of one per cent of the farmers of the state are in touch with the State Agricultural College and Experiment Station. It is practically unknown to the mass of the farmers.” That is true everywhere. There were more than ten million people at work on the farms of this country in 1900; and it needs a big school and a big teaching force to take them all in.
That is what we have to do. There are between six and seven million farms in the United States to-day. Their annual product of over $8,000,000,000 could be doubled without adding anything to the labor or money now expended. The average wheat yield of the country is now about 14 bushels per acre in good years. The same land might produce 30 bushels if properly cultivated. The average cotton yield is about four-tenths of a bale per acre, and possibly four times that amount could be raised as easily. The same holds true of the whole list of farm products. The farmer has been discouraged by seeing every other industry preferred to his. A false policy of stimulating these by legislative favors has naturally tended to tempt the intelligent, energetic and ambitious into other occupations.
While much praise is due to what is now being done, and well done, by the Agricultural Experi-
National Wealth and the Farm by J. J. Hill
(Continued from page 6) to enlarge his wheat acreage, it does not lead him to more careful tillage.
The situation, then, sums itself up thus: We have almost reached a point where, owing to increased population without increased production for our own needs; within ten years, possibly per acre, our home food supply will be insufficent less, we are likely to become a wheat-importing nation; the percentage of the population engaged in agriculture and the wheat product per acre are both falling; at the same time the cost of living is raised everywhere by this relative scarcity of bread, by artificial increase in the price of all manufactured articles, and by a habit of extravagance which has enlarged the view of both rich and poor of what are to be considered the necessaries of life. These plain facts should disturb and arouse not only the economic student but the men who are most intimately related to the wealth of the nation and most concerned that it shall not suffer loss or decrease.
You deal with wealth in its most condensed and universal form. That wealth is the slow accretion of many centuries. It changes its form and occupation with wonderful facility; but, so slight at all times is the margin between the world’s production and its consumption, that its savings have been acquired almost as slowly and painfully as the miser’s hoard. Practically only a few months lie between a universal cessation of production and the destruction of the human race by starvation. The marvelous diversity of modern industry and its products blinds us to the bare simplicity of the situation. Those who, like you, are main factors in supplying to industry the means to carry it on, who open up the main and lateral channels through which the fertilizing stream of capital may be turned upon the otherwise barren field of labor, should be always mindful of the first great source and storehouse of national wealth, and the most sensitive whenever it is depleted or endangered.
What we must come to—and the signs of the times indicate that we cannot make head in that direction too rapidly—is the smaller farm, with a more intensive agriculture. We support, in round numbers, 90,000,000 of people on 3,000,000 square miles of land. We should be able to support 150 per square mile as easily as 30; and then we should have but a fraction of the density of population of Denmark with 167 inhabitants per square mile, Holland with 448, or our