:?« Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcli ive.org/details/farmeroftomorrowOOandeiala THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY •CALCUTTA MELBOIffiNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TOKONTO THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW BY FREDERICK IRVING ANDERSON THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1913 i:,^^^ CJorrBioHT, 1912 Bt the ridgway company COPTRIOHT, 1913 Bt the MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and Eleotrotyped. Published April, 1918 PREFACE The author has sought to bring together in one volume a popular consideration of the two fundamental factors affecting the business of farming: first, the floor space of the American farmer in terms of land, and, second, the re- sources of the land itself, in terms of soil fer- tility. The inter-relation of these two factors must determine eventually the type of farm- ing of any community. "Where shall I locate my plant?" is the prime question the man who goes back to the land to-day must ask himself. Free land is gone; the rich homesteads of a decade or two ago, to be had for the asking, have forever passed into history. Yet there are opportuni- ties for the business farmers of to-day un- dreamed of by their ancestors of a generation or two ago to whom land was nothing but a means of labor. Less than one-half of the nine hundred million acres in the hands of the farmer is improved; nearly two-thirds of this vi PREFACE land nominally in farms has not yet been called on to produce food. There are swamps to be drained, cut-over forests to be cleared, deserts to be watered, and dry lands to be made pro- ductive by specialized crops and methods. Without increasing the efficiency of its im- proved acres, the nation still possesses enough resources in terms of land alone to feed double the population that exists to-day. It has been the author's endeavor to chart this empire of opportunity that awaits the gleaner in the period of reclamation which is now setting to- ward flood tide. The problem of the fertility of the soil is one of national importance; it determines not only the fortunes of the farmer in the field, but, in the end, the life of the nation. For gen- erations past, agricultural literature has been buried under a theory of doom imposed by a great chemist, Liebig, which teaches that the resources of the soil are as definite as cash in a bank or coal in a mine. Under this orthodox theory which actuates the machinery of the greater part of agricultural education as it exists to-day, the farmer must feed the soil if he would have the soil continue to feed him. Fail- ing this, it has been variously computed that PREFACE vii our soils, cropped for a scant three genera- tions, contain only enough mineral elements to continue producing food for seventy-five, one hundred, or one hundred and fifty years. The sole means offered to forestall this inevitable day of doom is the use of chemicals as fertili- zers, limited in supply themselves; a system which carried to its logical conclusion consid- ers the soil merely as a mixing bowl in which food may be manufactured synthetically. Recently, however, there has been put for- ward a more logical and less pessimistic hy- pothesis concerning the fertility of the soil — a hypothesis fathered by the scientists compos- ing the federal Bureau of Soils at Washing- ton and backed by a long series of classic ex- periments, as well as by the teachings of his- tory. This theory assumes the mineral ele- ments of the soil to be inexhaustible, an as- sumption which the history of China, whose soils are unimpaired, indeed are the richest in the world after 4,000 years of intensive culti- vation, seems to justify. An examination of this new hypothesis, in the light of orthodox criticism, shares the pages with a consideration of the extent of our land resources. CONTENTS CHAPTEB PAGE I. The Farmer of Yesterday .... 1 II. The Line of Least Resistance ... 34 III. The Gleaners 68 IV. The Dry Lands and the Forests . . 98 V. The Division of Soils and the Speciali- zation OF Crops 141 VI. The Bookkeeping Theory of Soil Fer- tility 173 VII. The Soil as an Immutable Asset . . 212 VIII. The Evidence of History and Research 243 IX. Soil Sanitation 272 Conclusion 300 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW "The soil is the one indestructible, immuta- ble asset that the Nation possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up. It may be impaired by abuse, but never destroyed." Milton Whitney. FARMER OF TO-MORROW CHAPTER I THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY James Fenimore Cooper, writing in 1827, marveled that in his own lifetime he had seen frontiersmen, lovers of the wild, driven from the forests of the upper Hudson across the prairies of the Middle West, finally to take refuge amid the arid plateaus and mountain wildernesses of the Great American Desert, before the advancing tide of settle- ments. The backwoodsmen of Kentucky and Tennessee had begun to move on into the un- known regions beyond the Mississippi as early as 1804, almost before the actual transfer of the territory of Louisiana had become a fact. Lewis and Clark, in their historic march from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River, begun in 1804, found white men before 1 ft THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW them, mostly Canadian French, hght -hearted, care-free wanderers who had come in from Montreal through the Straits of Mackinac at the confluence of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron and established a well-defined route of travel to the plains beyond the Mississippi by way of Green Bay and the Fox and Wis- consin Rivers. Still, as late as 1832, Washington Irving, journeying up the Missouri and out across the plains in search of information as to the "far west" at first-hand, conceived the "Great American Desert" as a territory so remote, so mythical in its confines and so terrible in its hardships that he believed it would never become an integral part of the States. In- stead, he pictured fantastically the growth there of another nation, a nation that would forever exist beyond the pale of civilization, a nation composed of outcasts, half-breeds, the scum of society; a race of men so wild, so lawless, so adventurous that they had al- ready adopted the worst traits of the savage Indians as their own and become the blood- brothers of the red-men of the plains. He pictured this roving mongrel horde pushed farther and farther back by the exten- THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 3 sion of settlements of law and order, until final- ly they would be forced to bond together for self-protection in the heart of the desert; and from them in time would spring an entity with traditions and ethics founded on barbarism and outlawry. Yet he himself lived to see "the Great American Desert" as a name wiped out of memory, and law and order established in the Great Plains region which once he had confidently predicted would never yield to the plow. The Oregon Trail had already become a fact in 1846, and a year or two later saw Mormon regiments that had fought in the Mexican War moving slowly across the plains and over the mountain barrier with their families and cattle, to be mustered out in California. In another year came the rush of gold-seekers, and before another decade had elapsed the country west of the Mississippi had become sufficiently populous to be rent asunder by the political question of States' rights. Cooper, the novelist, writing again in 1847, pointed with pride to the million and one-half souls which constituted the popula- tion of the State of New York, yet he ven- tured the prediction that the agricultural re- 4 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW sources of that State were so vast as to feed its people "for ages to come." These recorded facts relate, we might al- most say, to contemporary history, the his- tory of to-day. In 1909 there were still 395 widows of the War of 1812 on the pension roll of the government, and 2,459 soldiers of the war with Mexico still survived. It was only yesterday that our grandfathers went "west" with their yokes of oxen and iron ket- tles, considering themselves very well outfitted indeed; and selected fertile river bottoms where the most desultory cultivation removed them from want. Following the Civil War came the Home- stead Act, and out across the prairies swept the disbanded armies checking off the sections square by square ; moving like a cloud of wild pigeons, platoons from the rear-guard con- stantly detaching themselves and taking their place at the head of the ever-advancing column. Land, land, the illimitable land, the magic carpet with a rainbow at one end! Then came the period of the late 'eighties, the period of over-colonization, overproduc- tion— too much land, too much food, an THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 5 economic crisis quite as catastrophic in its way as famine. There was no one so poor as the farmer, nothing so cheap as corn, except hogs on the hoof, and grain became fuel. In the few decades following the Civil War, agricul- ture had emerged from its pastoral stage wherein each community had been sufficient unto itself. A contagion of railroad building cut up the prairies, bringing world markets, exchange, and perplexing wants into a region which heretofore had been its own butcher, baker and candle-stick maker. This period of too much land, too much food, and over- development in transportation that glutted the world market, brought about a decline in values which did not reach its low ebb until as late as 1896. In this connection it is worthy of note that, when a British railroad com- mission recently reported to its government on American Railroading, it explained the ef- ficiency of our railroads as being due to the penny-pinching attention to details which grew out of receiverships. Practically all our great railroad systems of the present day are the reconstruction of the bankruptcies of the late 'eighties and early 'nineties. It was then that our Jeremiahs, relics of a 6 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW pastoral period, came back from the land. The period is within the memory of the rising generation when the tide turned toward the cities; when nothing was so cheap as land, and whole townships were abandoned to mort- gages that could not be satisfied. Jeremiah the Reaper, who had gone forth seeking a "homestead," saw a miserable old age, and his' sons mounted high stools and adjusted high-power spectacles and became book- keepers. It was much better to buy two-cent hogs than to sell them. All of which brings us to our Jeremiah of the present day, who wants to go back to the land. This Jeremiah of to-day is a strange prod- uct. He is a fact, yet he is a glaring fallacy. He is a son of the Land, a son of sons of generations of the Land; yet in the one or two decades that have passed since he turned his back on the Land, too much Land, Land as a curse, he has involved himself and his fellows in a situation of such complexity that two out of every three hours he toils for his bread are devoted to the intricate process of bringing to his own door that same bread, the THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 7 product of the Land, without which he must die. It has not yet occurred to him in the mass that he has developed concentration and congestion to a point so remote from the pas- toral ideal of his forefathers that he has created the greatest anomaly of Waste in his- tory, a condition in which the simple act of distribution of food has become infinitely more complex than the basic process of production itself. He has built cities — 228 of which boast over 25,000 population; 50 more than 100,000; 19 more than a quarter of a million; 5 more than half a milhon, and 3 from 1,500,000 to 5,000,- 000. He has -constructed steel mills (a single corporation employing more than 200,000 souls), not only to transport the surplus of food, clothing and luxuries to world markets, but to feed, clothe and amuse himself in the very act of doing it. He has devised a system of banking and exchange as clumsy and timid as a rabbit, to move crops. He has acquired steamships, canals, telephones and telegraphs, marvelous systems of intercommunication, capitalized at ten times the value of the na- tion's farm lands that he knew a generation ago — capitalized at stupendous figures not 8 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW only in response to the demands of general manufactures, but also because he has chosen to turn his back on Land, and created the necessity of delivering his food from his hand to his mouth. Around him are clerks, stenog- raphers, merchants to administer to his needs, carpenters, masons, plumbers, artisans of hun- dreds of specialized trades, lawyers, doctors, ministers for his material and spiritual needs, and actors, musicians and buffoons to make him happy, merely for the purpose of permit- ting him to toil that he may live. It would be an interesting task to determine (or to attempt to determine, for the task would be difficult) how great a percentage of the population of five million souls who constitute the city of New York have their entire time employed in the process of feeding their fel- lows— who, by their efforts, produce nothing but the means of transporting food to satisfy their own hunger — who elect to devote their lives to the task of moving food from the spot where it is produced in abundance to the spot where it is not produced at all. It is a far cry indeed from the Jeremiah of to-day to the simple pastoral self-sufficiency of his an- cestors. Yet the population of the cities is be- THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 9 ing recruited in increasing numbers from the farms. It is too late to turn back the hands of the clock, though we still persist in the fiction that we are an agricultural nation. Look at Jeremiah for a moment. He is, say, thirty-five, and lives in a flat. He works eight hours, sleeps nine, and spends the re- mainder of his day in his carpet slippers and street cars. Light, air, fuel and water, the products of Nature, are fed to him through tubes ; vacuum and gravity are harnessed for his light house- keeping. The municipality, of which he is a member in good standing, disposes of his waste paper and potato peelings ; regulates noise and smell; inspects his food; guarantees him so many cubic feet of air to sleep in, a minimum bacterial count of 50,000 to the c. c. in his morning's milk, and a ladder in case of fire; assumes the supervision of the eyes, teeth and intellect of his children; polices him, sweeps his streets, counts him at birth, marriage and death and at the polls, fumigates him, makes music for him in the parks, and keeps him off the grass. All that is left for Jeremiah is to work eight hours a day and keep on good terms with his 10 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW janitor. And a paternal automatism extracts its tithes by a process at once so complex and so lulling that it borders on the mystic. He is not even enumerated as a "tax-payer." He buys bread by the pound, potatoes by the quart and eggs by the ounce, and milk, signed, sealed and delivered in glass. Every time he expends one dollar for food, thirty-five cents of it is edible, and sixty-five cents goes for wrap- ping paper and string, interstate commerce, and demurrage. Jeremiah is a consumer. But Jeremiah dreams of the days of his youth: of the wood pile, the evening chores, the frozen pump, apples that have never known a feather-duster, and the great shadowy barn with its fragrant haymow and its row of soft-eyed placid cows. Jeremiah and Mary — ^they met and married in a boarding house — take the subway to Van Cortlandt Park or the ferry boat to Staten Island every Sunday to walk on the grass. The lure of the land is in their souls, and they wear rubber heels on their shoes. A remote, an almost hypothetical aunt names them in her will. This opens a door — because in all his years of toil he has been spending so much in bringing his food from THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 11 the farm that he has never been able to save enough to go back to the farm where the food comes from. Jeremiah resigns his high stool, his high-power spectacles and his green shade, and a through Pullman sets Jeremiah and Mary down on a willow-bank, where he was born and raised. Let us say that this was in Iowa, because Iowa as a State presents in a mass the con- ditions developed in our national life in that brief interval between the time when Jeremiah turned his back on the Land, and to-da^y, when he seeks to return. Yes, this is home. But somehow things do not look the same. There is an extra wing on the house and a second story has been added ; it is freshly painted and shingled and wears green blinds. There is a red barn with white battens, housing a glistening gang plow and a binder, and a pair of ton horses with big creases in their backs are browsing in the feed lot. There is a wind-mill and a telephone, and hot-and-cold water, and woven wire fences, and a suspicious odor of gasoline. "Here is the screw loose," thought Jere- miah. "The farmer is making too much 12 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW money. There are too many consumers and not enough producers. The farmer has got hold of the gate receipts. I am glad I came." "Well, well," laughed the willow-bank farmer as he looked Jerry over, "I remember you as a little shaver. I bought this farm from your father at ten dollars an acre. I tried to worm out of the deal but the old man held me to it." "I was born here," said Jeremiah, gazing sentimentally at the willow-bank — it did look like home, after all. "I should like to buy the farm back if it is for sale." Yes, this was the very quarter-section that Jeremiah's grandfather drew out of the grab- bag, back in the 'forties, when the West was a magic carpet with a rainbow at one end, when one had to hunt over five square miles in this neighborhood to find a whole person, excluding Indians not taxed. Yes, this was the very spot where the old gentleman culti- vated hogs with long legs as beasts of burden to carry hams and bacon to market. (Later, when railways came, they bred the legs down to nubbins, for delicatessen.) Yes, this was the very spot where less than thirty years ago Jeremiah's father fed his corn to the stove. THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 13 because there was too much corn and too many hogs, and not enough people in the whole world to eat the hogs; when there was no- body so poor as the farmer. And, standing before him now, was the very man who had gone down in the traditions of the family as having been hooked and landed by the second generation of Jeremiahs at ten dollars an acre. The memory of that ten dol- lars had bathed the declining days of the second generation in sunshine. And here was the third generation, looking wistfully at the fat fields crowding the fence posts, wondering what had become of the swamp, the wood lot, the hog-wallow, and the mud road. "Ten dollars an acre!" Jeremiah was mus- ing to himself. He was dreaming of the magic carpet with a And the willow-bank farmer . . . What was he dreaming about? He was dreaming of Saskatchewan. He was anxious to scamper across the map with his three stalwart sons to the last tee. He liked the looks of this senti- mental young couple. He would do his best to arrange matters for them. Not on the basis of corn as fuel, however. 14 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW He was figuring on dollar wheat, sixty-cent corn, and ten-cent hogs. All his land nominally in farm was real farm. It w^as mellow prairie loam, the mold of centuries, from fifteen to one hundred feet deep. It was rich, and ripe for skinning — one hundred acres of it. The average farmer ought to consider his plant above the average of his State. But the willow-bank farmer would figure himself be- low. He would even throw off seven dollars and forty-four cents and four mills — and call it an even fifteen thousand dollars. One hundred and fifty dollars an acre! Jeremiah untied his livery horse and assisted Mary to her seat, and they drove slowly back to town, leaving the willow-bank farmer tinkering over a new gasoline thrashing outfit. They remembered having read somewhere that Dean Liberty H. Bailey, of the lamented Country Life Commission, had said that the back-to-the-land movement was an economic fallacy. But they remembered this only for the moment. Economic fallacies have to do with masses, not individuals. If the willow- bank farmer could buy automobiles and wear green shutters on his house, Jeremiah and THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 15 Mary could do likewise with the same tools. So they drove back to the farm the next day. The willow-bank farmer was inclined to be generous. He accepted a payment of two thousand dollars cash (which had been earn- ing six per cent, in an industrial investment) ; and he accepted a mortgage of thirteen thou- sand dollars at six per cent. In other words, Jeremiah and Mary were to pay nine dollars an acre rent. Land is capital! That was reasonable and business- like. Jeremiah and Mary were going into the business of manufacturing food. And the farmer, rather than put the sen- timental young couple to the expense of buy- ing machinery, rented them his. He did not know much about such transactions ; but Jere- miah, having been a bookkeeper in his role of consumer, knew all about it. He suggested ten per cent, for depreciation, and six per cent, interest. A farmer, or a manufacturer, re- places his machinery every ten years, on the average; and this seemed equitable. No in- dustrial concern could pay a dividend and keep out of the hands of the postal authorities without debiting a like charge to equipment. 16 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW So much for his plant and equipment. Now for the item of labor. Jeremiah didn't have any sons of his own. He couldn't pay his labor in board and cloth- ing and salt. He had to hire labor. Twenty cents an hour for human labor, and ten cents an hour for horses — including care and keep. And he concluded that if hired labor was worth twenty cents an hour, his own labor was worth twent)'^ cents an hour. And he concluded that if a scrubwoman was worth five cents an hour, Mary was worth five cents an hour. Mary cooked and washed and ironed and sewed and darned and swept and dusted and made the beds and looked after the chickens and nursed the garden and churned butter and set the milk. She was labor. He concluded, furthermore, that there were profits — or recompense, at least — due to him- self as the superintendent who managed and risked so much capital. In addition, there were the taxes and in- surance— say three per cent, on a three-fifths valuation. Jeremiah, j^ou see, was entering the business THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 17 of farming. He was a bookkeeper and he knew all about costs of production. Jeremiah is the new pioneer. Cheap land, free land, is gone. When there is no more land to give away, land becomes capital, exacts rent. No matter whether the price is too high or too low, it is fixed by culture and sentiment and speculation; by three genera- tions of homesteading, and by a population that has increased fourfold in seventy years. Are Jeremiah's fixed charges, his cost of production, too high? Ask yourself, Mr. Farmer, you of the Middle West, of the Rain Belt, you who are producing the surplus for hungry mouths. You say that your land — which may happen to be in the door-yard of the Grain Pit and the Stock Yards — ^is worth more than one hundred and fifty dollars an acre. You say that your neighbor's land, land in the next county, in the next State, is worth less than one hundred and fifty dollars. If your acre does not exact the same rent as Jeremiah's then the process of distribution makes up the difference. What does your labor cost you ? How much does it cost you to grow an acre of corn? You don't know! Hired labor, paid for by the 18 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW hour, day, week, or month, was beyond the experience of fifty-two per cent, of the Iowa farmers canvassed by the 1910 census. Forty- eight per cent, of them reported expenditures for labor at one time or another. They knew how much hired labor cost them. But how much their own labor cost, how much it was worth, they did not know. And the Census Bureau did not think it worth while to inquire. Several years ago experts of the Depart- ment of Agriculture picked out five thousand wide-awake farmers all over the country and asked them to cooperate with the department in running down the question of labor. How much did it cost them, in time or wages, to grow an acre of corn, labor to be charged at prevailing rates? In New England an acre of corn cost $16.82, not counting "rent"; in the South At- lantic States, $11.29; in the Middle West, from $9.10 to $6.82. The willow-bank farmer kindly advised Jeremiah as to crops. Had he not been farm- ing these acres for more than a score of years ? Jeremiah took his advice. Thus custom and habit determine crops. THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 19 He sowed his seed and prayed for rain. The rest was up to the Weather Man. Jupiter Pluvius, the arch-manufacturer of aridity and humidity, is the court of last resort. If the heavens are propitious, fat crops; if the heavens turn a cold, sour face to the land, lean crops. Sunshine and rain, fair and foul weather, text-books to the contrary notwith- standing, have been the sole factor affecting the yield of our acres since the American far- mer was in his swaddling-clothes. Weather is the pressure gauge; it determines the revolu- tions per minute, so to speak, of this big ma- chine. If our acres are not producing enough food, put more acres under cultivation. We are producing three times as much corn to-day as we did fifty years ago, not because we have increased the efficiency of our plant, but merely because we are plowing three times as many acres. Several years ago two weather-wise experts (J. Warren Smith, Section Director of the Weather Bureau at Washington, and Pro- fessor W. D. Gibbs, of the New Hampshire State College) constructed two charts to show the relation between crops and weather. One chart was to illustrate the rainfall in inches; 20 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW the other to illustrate the yield per acre, bushels of corn, in the corn-growing states. They fitted the two charts together. Even the two experts were not prepared for the striking result shown. The two charts fitted each other like a dovetail joint! Every varia- tion in rainfall was accompanied by a cor- responding variation in bushels of corn. In as recent a period of enlightenment as 1901 there was a famine in corn. Solely for the reason that Jupiter Pluvius loafed on his job. He had been expected to produce eleven inches of rain that summer, and he actually furnished only a scant six inches. Don't blame the farmer. Blame the Weather Man. Take another instance : During the decade 1867-1876, the best yield of corn in Nebraska was 42.2 bushels to the acre — in 1869, and the poorest yield was 10 bushels to the acre — in 1874. The ten-year average was 32.5. Some- where between high and low a whole season's product was lost. Was it the farmer's fault that he received one bushel of corn one year for the same amount of labor that paid him four bushels another year? Human ingenuity has constructed intricate machinery to crop ten acres with the ease of THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 21 one. Machinery expands acreage. It does not increase productivity. The only additional labor Jeremiah expends to-day over what his grandfather expended is in fighting weeds, insects, and fungous diseases. These three scourges of elementary agriculture were driven from their happy hunting-grounds by the plow, and they have turned on their despoiler, subdivided their species into highly specialized organizations, and are thriving on civilized fare. So Jeremiah is farming at the same rate to-day that he was fifty years ago — one hun- dred years ago. In fact, he is farming at the same rate as the sixteenth-century yokel who plowed with a crooked stick instead of a gas- oline tractor. This is amply proved by many records. The burghers of Schmatzfeld, Ger- many, produced an average of 12.5 bushels of wheat to the acre in the period from 1552 to 1557. Minnesota, a State which grows more wheat than the entire country east of the Al- leghanies and south of the Ohio River, has averaged 12.4 bushels for fifty years. The Weather Man has been (lodging jokes patiently for more than forty years, amassing enough evidence to take the responsibility. He 22 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW has found that sunshine and rain vary not only from year to year, but from decade to decade ; that weather travels in great cycles. Appar- ently we have passed through one complete cycle. A few years after Civil War, the yield of our acres began to decline. The land wasn't "exhausted." Most of it was new land that had never known the plow. And the slump was characteristic of all sections, from sea- board to seaboard. Then, in the middle 'eighties, the line began to recover itself. (It is worth while noting in passing that it was during the decade of lowest yields that the country passed through its most critical economic period, a period of vast overproduc- tion of foodstuffs. That was the period of too much land for the given rate of speed, the sunshine-and-rain rate of speed.) The line ascends slowly for another ten years. In an- other twenty it has recovered itself, and Jere- miah is getting as much out of an acre in bushels as his Civil War competitor did. It is still on the upward wave. And so Jeremiah plants his corn and prays for rain. If he follows the methods of his neighbors, he will plant five acres out of every THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 23 fourteen in corn; and two in oats, and two in hay to feed the horses that cultivate the corn. Thus nine out of fourteen acres go for corn, directly or indirectly. Jeremiah has a good year, an average year. Sunshine and rain are kind to him. Bugs and blight are kept at a respectful distance. His corn is worth fourteen dollars an acre. The average, in his neighborhood, has been $11.54 since the time when the first cultivated hog was dressed for market. Five staple crops in his neighborhood average less than fourteen dollars. The ten staple crops of the United States that account for ninety-five per cent, of the three hundred and ten million acres which the farmer actually plows (wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, buckwheat, potatoes, tobacco, hay, and cotton) have varied from $16.42 in 1909 (when the cost of living became academic) to $7.94 in 1896. The average acreage return has been $12.04 since the dawn of statistics, forty-five years ago. That means the cultivated acre, not the scrub one. So you see Jeremiah is rather successful, in spite of his years as a consumer. Jeremiah opens his books and strikes a balance — in red ink! 24 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW He looks once, he looks twice, he dashes across the pasture lot to Neighbor Jones, who is polishing off a new automobile in the sun- shine. Jeremiah explodes with the direful tidings. He is bankrupt! Farmer Jones is bank- rupt! Everybody is bankrupt! They ought to be in the hands of a conservator, or at least a receiver. And Farmer Jones — who has been there a long time — looks at Jeremiah, once, twice, and then says honk! honk! with his new horn. But there it is in black and white. Look back a few paragraphs and figure it out for yourself, in rent, labor, and taxes. Never mind the salary for the superintendent who was to risk and manage so much capital. Cut out the five cents an hour that was to go to Mary. In bare time it has cost Jeremiah from seven to nine dollars an acre to sow, cultivate, harvest, and haul his corn. Add the item of interest. Then bring on the tax bills. Jere- miah sells his corn at the market, the price of hunger, the price with which his neighbors buy automobiles. And for every acre of food he has manufactured, he stands an actual loss. If he doesn't pay rent — that is, interest on THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 25 capital — the sheriff will get him. If he doesn't pay his labor, his men will garnishee him. If he doesn't pay his taxes, he will be advertised. The only privilege land has given him is to expend his labor. The only privilege labor has given him is to draw on his bank account. "And you are in the same boat that I am!" cried Jeremiah to Farmer Jones. "Wait a minute," saj^s Neighbor Jones. "Why should I pay interest — or rent, as you call it — on my land? It didn't cost me one hundred and fifty dollars an acre. I in- herited it from my father. The Government caught him when he wasn't looking and made him a present of it. And what have wages got to do with me?" asks Farmer Jones. "I have two sons and a daughter and wife. I pay them their salt. And we have just bought a new six-cylinder sixty." "Isn't your time worth anything?" asked Jeremiah. "It's my own time, isn't it?" demanded Farmer Jones. "I can do what I please with it." "If you sold your land and invested the cash in a factory to make biscuits or buttons 26 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW or gunpowder, instead of keeping it invested in land to grow corn, would you expect it to return you anything? Or would you con- sider that it merely provided you with a job that you could pass around among all the members of your family?" "I would expect it to return me something, of course," admitted Farmer Jones. "Say you invested it in industrial stock," suggested Jeremiah. "You would not have to turn a hand for that six per cent., would you? You and your family could ride around in your six-cylinder sixty all day, and you wouldn't have to bother about getting up at four o'clock in the morning to feed the horses and start for the field. Your capital would work for you. And, Mr. Jones," went on the bankrupt, "if you had inherited a soap fac- tory instead of a farm from your father, that soap factory would have to earn interest on its capital, and pay fixed charges, to stay in business, wouldn't it? Or would you run it as a charitable institution and forget to figure on cost of production? How long do you think your laborers would work for you if you paid them salt and garden truck and a fresh chicken on Sunday? And how did you hap- THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 27 pen to sell your corn at forty cents a bushel, Mr. Jones?" "That's the market price," explained Mr. Jones. "That's what they are paying." "Exactly! That's what they offered you. If you were making soap instead of corn, do you think you would sell your soap for what they offered you? Or do you think you would sell it for what it cost to manufacture, plus a fair interest on the capital involved?" But Farmer Jones isn't bothering about abstruse problems. He isn't bothering about the cost of production. He is interested only in the credit side of the ledger. The debits don't affect him. If it really is true that he has to pay rent and wages, then his liabilities are in the hands of preferred creditors, himself and his wife, and their sons and daughters. What is a small matter of insolvency, if one can keep it in the family circle? If Farmer Jones is broke because he owes himself money, you will have to show him. "But how about me!" cried Jeremiah. "I think I see the sheriff coming down the road now." It wasn't the sheriff. It was only the willow-bank farmer coming back from Canada 28 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW and anxious to do business at the old stand. He was willing to wipe the slate clean, in consideration of the fact that there is no place like home, after all. When he heard Jere- miah's story, the willow-bank farmer had the same notions as Farmer Jones ; but he assumed a little more sympathy for Jeremiah. "Why don't you go on farther west, where you can get land for fifty or one hundred dol- lars an acre?" he asked. "What good would that do me?" asked Jeremiah. "What I would save in interest on capital, I would lose in freight getting my corn to market. It would be all the same in the long run." And he was right. Corn in Kansas is worth about three dollars an acre less than corn in Iowa. Something is wrong. You will probably say at this point that the remedy is obvious. Let Jeremiah put on more steam. He is running his plant at one-third pressure, you say. The American farmer is growing only twenty-seven bushels of corn to the acre. Why, in 1910, a school-boy, Jerry Moore, harvested two hundred and twenty- seven and two-thirds bushels of corn on a THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 29 measured acre! That shows what could be done if the American farmer would increase his speed. Let us apply this remedy to Jeremiah as an individual. In the first place, it cost little Jerry Moore something like one hundred and forty dollars in capital and labor to win his medal in the Boys' Corn Growing Contest. That contest was a brilliant example of how to farm with capital. Jeremiah doesn't want to be told how to farm with capital. He wants to know how to farm tcithout capital. He hasn't one hundred and forty dollars, nor half of it, nor yet a quarter of it, to expend on a single acre. The world isn't hungry enough yet to finance him. Little Belgium is, with its six hundred and fifty souls to the square mile; but the United States, with only thirty- one souls to the square mile, is still remote from the necessity. Now apply the remedy to Jeremiah as a mass, to the great American farmer. How would it work out? Take Iowa as an example. She is a good example because she grows thirty times as much corn as the entire western half of the country. In her bumper year (1910) she grew three 30 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW hundred and forty million bushels. The price fell to thirty-eight cents. The next year she grew two hundred and seventy million. The price rose to fifty-five cents. If she grew five hundred millions — as she could — the price would go to twenty cents, on the same basis of calculating. Fifty-five-cent corn paid the farmers $148,- 000,000. Thirty-eight-cent corn paid them $129,- 000,000. Twenty-cent corn would pay them $100,- 000,000! And, the freight on twenty-cent corn is the same as the freight on dollar corn. No, the so-called intelligent culture is no more use to Jeremiah than his boot-straps would be to pull him out of the mire. Until the world is hungry enough to finance Jeremiah; or until the middle-men give him more than thirty-five cents of the consumer's dollar, text- book farming will remain a dogma and nothing more. A thousand, or a hundred thousand, farmers may dabble in it, providing they have enough capital — because this efficiency engineering THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 31 costs money; but they must be very careful or they will upset the balance. The margin is slight. A few years ago potato growers in Maine became so efficient, so intelligent, that they were forced to sell out at eleven cents a bushel. "If the farmers of the United States were to produce as much, acre for acre, to-day, as the farmers of Belgium," said Professor Milton Whitney, of the Bureau of Soils, re- cently, "the world would face the greatest panic in its history." Then what is wrong with Jeremiah? Is the price of land too high? Is the price of food too low? The trouble with Jeremiah is that he is ahead of his times. He came too late for the old order of things. He is too early for the new order. Jeremiah tried to compete free-handed, on improved acres, with a subsidized industry — with an industry that has grown up to a capi- talization of fifty billion dollars, and hasn't found its feet yet. Seventy per cent, of his six and a half mil- lion competitors can afford to ignore land as representing capital. They got it for nothing 32 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW or for a song. Till to-day — or let us say yes- terday— a charitable old gentleman in chin whiskers and a red-white-and-blue waistcoat has been lying awake nights devising new schemes for giving away quarter-sections. Now farm land is all gone, except for the small matter of, say, two hundred and sixty million acres of scenery that nobody would take as a gift. It was all gone ten years ago, except for a core, a scant four per cent. The late- comers lined up and drew lots for this four per cent. Our farm land has been employed till to-day — or yesterday — not as capital, but as a means of labor. And as labor it has paid big wages. It didn't have to pay interest on capital until there was no more of it to be had for the asking. Meantime, "unearned increment" has sud- dently appeared on the horizon. Railroads, cities, the increasing hunger of the world, and the demands of those who drew blanks in the lottery, have increased the appraised price of land as capital 118 per cent, in the first ten years of the new century. With capital comes interest, rent. Jere- miah is the pioneer of the business of farm- ing, the establishment of agriculture on its THE FARMER OF YESTERDAY 33 permanent basis. He can't compete with the old order yet. Then the price of land is too high! Possibly. But if you speak softly, no one will suspect it — except the Jeremiahs — be- cause seventy per cent, of the farms are still being worked as a means of labor, according to the moon. You can't persuade this seventy per cent, that cost of production means any- thing to them, when they happen to be both delinquent debtor and amiable creditor rolled into one. CHAPTER II THE LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE The actual task of gathering up our be- longings and starting "back to the land" is so much more of an undertaking than the mere talking about it, that the so-called movement has never gone much beyond breakfast-table conversation. We began talking about it a decade or two ago when we were still pastoral enough as a nation to count two-thirds of the population as rural. To-day nearly one-half of our ninety-two millions elect to live in cities, places remote from the food surplus — actually forty-six per cent, in the last census. So the pendulum has swung in the other direction and is still swinging. Occasionally, however, an individual does break away, with a vague idea of following in the foot-steps of his grandfather — or maybe his father — who went "west" with a yoke of oxen and an iron kettle. Such a one, for instance, 34 LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE 35 we find seeking advice in the questions-and- answers column of a middle- west farm weekly. He has a capital of five thousand dollars and he would like to know what section of the country offers him the best advantages for farming. This editor — ^this is an actual in- stance— replied : "If you have no more than five thousand dollars I would not advise you to attempt farming." Note, the editor did not ask the correspond- ent to state what his training and experience had been — if, in other words, he possessed the qualifications to fit him for the business he purposed to enter. Instead, he dismissed the inquirer — who probably represents a million of his kind — as he would dismiss a mechanic too poor to buy tools. There is a tremendous gap (not so much one of years as of rapidly changing conditions ) between the viewpoint of this practical and experienced observer of latter-day conditions and that of Horace Greeley less than two generations ago. It is the difference between land which has, in an incredibly short time, become capital, demanding its tithe — and land as we knew it 36 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW in the days of our youth, too much land, nothing but land, land as means of labor. The fact that the average farm in the State of Iowa was appraised at over fifteen thousand dollars in value by the census enumerators of 1910 is sufficient to open our eyes to the develop- ments of the last decade. We are already beginning to appreciate the fact — though the time is not yet sufficiently remote to give us the proper perspective — that the opening of the present century marks a very definite milestone in the progress of the nation. The period is so definite in fact that its characteristics can be reduced to a simple chart. On the one side, the closing de- cades of the nineteenth century is a slowly descending line, picturing the declining for- tunes of the United States as an agricultural nation, due to over-development of land re- sources. On the other side is a steadily as- cending line, marking the sudden rise of manufactures and commerce, a new align- ment of producers and consumers of food, eventually bringing about a new era of pros- perity in the despised industry of farming. Trace the history of great individual fortunes founded on commerce and manufactures and LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE 37 we find that practically all of them came into existence with the beginning of the twentieth century. At the same time the class of im- migrants from Europe began to change. They were no longer tillers of the soil. They were cheap labor, drafted by expanding man- ufacturing industries. During the decade closing the last century we welcomed three million souls, mostly immigrants from the south of Europe. During the first decade of the present century we tripled the number. This abrupt change in the character of the national life must have reacted on the basic industry — ^that of supplying food for hungry mouths. That is the phase of the situation with which we have to do here. It is respon- sible for the new problems that face our Jere- miahs, who are beginning to turn their faces toward the land. Farming in any country must first pass through its pastoral stage, the stage when each unit is sufficient unto itself. But sooner or later it develops into an industry having a surplus to exchange, an industry which must be conducted according to business principles. Each farm eventually becomes a producing plant, subject to the same requirements as the 38 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW business of making buttons or biscuits. If the correspondent who toiled and saved for years to fit himself to go back to the land had been a close observer of present-day conditions, he would have found an explanation of the editor's contempt for his five thousand dollars capital in a single fact gleaned from the last census. In the decade ending in April, 1910, the population of the United States — ^mouths to be fed — increased twenty-one per cent; in the same period, land — the source of food — increased in acreage only 4.8 per cent. That means that every acre nominally in farms was called on to feed more mouths than before. Yet the aver.age acre did not materially in- crease in productiveness in those ten years. In spite of the propaganda of intensive farming, which is to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before, the productiveness of our manufacturing plant for food has not varied in efficiency since the beginning. It has followed absolutely the pressure gage imposed by fluctuating weather conditions. To meet the additional demands of hunger, the industry of farming has heretofore increased its floor space, the number of acres under the plow. This is what it attempted to do at the begin- LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE 39 ning of the present century. But instead of increasing its floor space twenty-one per cent., it increased it less than one-fourth of that amount. There seemed only one way to make up for the deficiency. That was to turn to eo oo CO oo » CO eo o \ / 1 _^ 1 r 1 f '1 / ■""") ?G --, \ 1 '. *» \ \/^ I ^ 1 , , vf CO- -J LL 1 i\ <• "h 1 1 1 „ ! ' Ij' ^?4-i^ \\ T t 1 V. \ 1 lir , T« [_ ^ K 1 ^ < ii' £ - — \ 1 J 1 •<. 4 N T' »' > ' •*??-- \ 1; \ f ( ^ I 1 " ' "^ ^CC - \ !i 1 1 ^0^ " I' \ 1 1 18-^ CORN 1 "*.- 16 — -- 'Te/ef per.acre m years /pa {cafea ^m — A 'erac jeyj a diO Ysan s 3H< iir SL ^ /e ar sr Ti //C <7/ g£ t ._ Ftom United Slates Crop Reporter, February, 1913.' The weighted acreage yield of corn for the country as a whole. Note the dip marking the middle period, due to weather cycles. All crops in all sections of the country ex- hibit the same general tendency, i. e., low yields during the 'eighties and 'nineties. The fact that this period of lowest production was also a period of lowest prices illustrates the extent of the over-development of our food resources at that time. the exports of food-stuffs which have been re- sponsible for the traditional balance of trade in our favor. We had to retain at home the food we had formerly shipped abroad. In the last half of the last decade the exports of food- stuffs began a rapid decline. Two things were bound to happen. First, 40 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW the price of food was bound to go up. Second, the price of land as capital — land as the plant in which is manufactured a limited supply of food — must follow suit. That is why the cor- respondent whose father went west with a yoke of oxen and an iron kettle found the editor rather impatient at his mention of five thousand dollars to outfit a modern farmer with land, stock and machinery. There is not much margin between famine and plenty. The world's hunger follows close on the heels of harvest. A reader of statis- tical bent can trace the history of the American farmer, explain all his ups and downs, by examining the per capita production of bread and meat since the Civil War. A chart com- prised of these elements would show that the farmer was prosperous during the decade fol- lowing the Civil War, in spite of depreciated currency and reconstruction. There were too many mouths to feed and not enough acres under cultivation to feed them. Then came the Homestead Act, with its tide of settlers rolling west, finally to be turned back by the wall of mountains. By 1879 we find the "floor space" devoted to producing food catching up with the normal demands of an increasing LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE 41 population; and from 1879 onward until 1896 (the year of the lowest food prices in the entire cycle) the farmers of the west carried over- »^ OO o OJ •;*• to CO tp t^ I — r^ r*^ r— r- ao oo oo CO oc CO oo U. S. Crop Reporter, Dec. 1911. Chart showing relative production per acre and per capita in the United States of 10 crops (wheat, corn, oats, barley, buckwheat, rye, potatoes, hay, tobacco, and cotton) combined. 100 represents the average for the 43 years, 1833-1908. production to a point where even the world market could not absorb the surplus. It was during this period that old Jeremiah, the pio- neer, came hack from the land because there was no one so poor as the farmer. It was dur- ing the later part of this same period that our present-day trans-continental trunk-lines were reconstructed out of the receiverships follow- ing two decades of depression. In the latter part of the 'nineties hunger again caught up. 42 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW with the plow, passed it with the opening of the new century, and since then has maintained the lead. A business which produces too little or too much draws its returns accordingly. Every item in lack of balance, on one side or the other of the scale, is reflected in dollars and cents. The dollars and cents return to the American farmer for the last fifty years is in fact a huge curve, touching low ebb at the middle period. Thus the farmer who stayed in busi- ness in the unsettled times following the Civil War received $15.74 for every acre of floor space he devoted to the production of food in 1871. But his returns began to fall away with the rush of homesteaders — competitors. A line indicating value per acre of farm products tells the story of the decline in fortune of the farmer of those days. It is a ragged line, because in some years the heavens smiled bountifully on the land, doubling its super- abundance; while other years swung the bal- ance in the opposite direction, either because of drought or too much rain. Nevertheless the returns the farmer gleaned from his acres fell steadily. In 1886 he had to be content with a return LINE OF LEAST RESISTANCE 43 of only $9.41 for the labor he expended on one acre. It cost him just as much care and 16 15 n A y ^, t A ^ / s. / J3 9 8 \ \ t ' I / A \ A / > \ /• \ I / \ / \ / \, / "s II 1 a 2 F 3 a 2 2 3 a 2 ? 2 2 - « 3 O :> a 3 Oi -1 ^ 3 a 3 O 5 y I 1 3 < ^ s o o -> ^~ Kf> o f^-* ^t- *-0 OO CS D oo OO OO ^-> cr> OO OO o7