The Challenge of the Country Part 10

CHAPTER IV

TRIUMPHS OF SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE

I. _Its Struggle with Rural Conservatism_

Modern efficiency in city and country.

The natural conservatism of farmers.

What is progressive agriculture?

Its development by government patronage.

II. _Some Special Aspects of Scientific Agriculture_

Intensive farming and conservation of fertility.

Achievements of scientific breeding.

Marvels of plant production.

Irrigation and the problem of the desert.

Dry farming possibilities.

III. _Some Results of Scientific Farming_

Agriculture now a profession.

Conservation: a new appeal to patriotism.

Permanency of rural Christendom now possible.

CHAPTER IV

TRIUMPHS OF SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE

I. Its Struggle with Rural Conservatism.

_Modern Efficiency not Confined to Cities_

_Efficiency_ is everywhere demanded by the spirit of our times. We are living in an age that does things. Whatever the difficulties, it somehow gets things done. It brings to pa.s.s even the seemingly impossible. Are there mountains in the way? It goes over, under, or through.--There are no mountains! Is there an isthmus, preventing the union of great seas and blocking commerce? It erases the isthmus from the world's map.--There is no isthmus! The masterful time-spirit has little patience with puttering inefficiency. It expects every man to pull his weight, to earn his keep, to do his own task, and not to whimper.

Our cities are hives of efficiency, cruel efficiency often. With new pace-makers every year, the wheels of industry speed ever faster, raising the percentage of effectiveness, per dollar of capital and per capita employed. Hundreds at the wheels, with scant nerves, fail to keep the pace; and the race goes by them. But the pace keeps up. Other workmen grow more deft and skillful. The product is both cheapened and perfected. The plant becomes more profitable, under fine executive efficiency. The junk-heap grows apace: Out goes every obsolete half-success. In comes every new machine which reduces friction, doubles results, halves the cost of maintenance, and swells dividends. Surely efficiency is the modern shibboleth.

Here is the new Tungsten electric lamp, which uses half the current, at low voltage, but doubles the light; the very dazzling symbol of efficiency. How it antiquates the best Edison lamp of yesterday! Yet the Tungsten becomes old-fashioned in a year. It is too fragile and is speedily displaced by the improved Mazda.

But _city_ life has no monopoly on efficiency. In fact we do not find in the mills or factories the best ill.u.s.trations of modern effectiveness. We have to go back to the soil. Agriculture has become the newest of the arts, by the grace of modern science. To make two blades of gra.s.s grow where one grew before is too easy now. Multiplying by two is small boys'

play. Burbank has out-Edisoned Edison! He and other experimenters in the scientific breeding of plants and animals have increased the efficiency of every live farmer in the land, and have added perhaps a billion dollars a year to the nation's wealth.

They have not yet crossed the bee and the firefly, as some one has suggested, to produce an illuminated bee that could work at night by his own light. Nor have they produced woven-wire fences by crossing the spider and the wire-worm! Not yet; but they have done better. By skillful cross-breeding, they have raised the efficiency of the sugar beet from 7% to 15% sugar. They have produced hardy, seedless oranges, plums, apples, and strawberry plants which will stand the climate of the frozen north.

They have developed fine, long-stapled cotton, high-yielding cereal grains, and mammoth carnations and chrysanthemums. They have produced the wonderberry, the Wealthy Apple and the Burbank Potato. They have developed flax with 25% more seed. And the "Minnesota Number Thirteen Corn," so hardy and sure, has carried the cornbelt in three great states fully fifty miles further to the north, with its magnificent wake of golden profits.

No wonder America feeds the world. Such is our splendid Yankee genius for efficiency. It is the master-spirit, the ruling genius of our age; and it shows itself best on our fields and prairies. Other nations compete fairly well with our manufactures. They outstrip us in commerce. But they are hopelessly behind our American agriculture. The farm products of this country amounted in the year 1910 to almost nine billion dollars. The corn crop alone was worth a billion and a half; enough to cancel the entire interest-bearing debt of the United States, buy all of the gold and silver mined in all the countries of the earth in 1909, and still leave the farmers pocket-money.[21]

_The Natural Conservatism of Farmers_

In all fairness it must be said, the modern gospel of progressiveness has not been everywhere accepted, far from it. Plenty of farmers, doubtless the majority, are still following the old traditions. Country folks as a rule are conservative. They like the old ways and are suspicious of "new-fangled notions." Director Bailey of Cornell enjoys telling the comment he overheard one day from a farmer of this sort. It was after he had been speaking at a rural life conference, doubtless proposing various plans for better farming, which differed from the honored superst.i.tions of the neighborhood. A stolid native was overheard saying to his neighbor, "John, let them blow! They can't hurt me none." He prided himself on being immune to all appeals at such a rural life revival.

Such a man is very common among the hills, and wherever the soil is poor; but he is beginning to feel lonesome in really prosperous rural communities, for the new agriculture is fast winning its way. That is, the application of science to agriculture has proved its efficiency by actual tangible results. A farmer may be so superst.i.tious as to begin nothing on a Friday, nor butcher during a waning moon for fear his meat will shrink, nor use an iron plow for fear it may poison the soil! But when his neighbor by modern methods adds 50% to his crop, he knows there must be something in it. The new _theory_ he always greets with "I don't believe it!" but the knock-down argument of facts compels his reluctant faith.

Soon he gives the new heresy a trial himself; and success makes him a convert to the new gospel.

An experience like this is a serious thing for a hide-bound conservative, long wedded to old methods. It means that "the former things are pa.s.sed away and behold all things are become new." He loses his superst.i.tions as he discovers the laws of cause and effect. He gradually concludes that farming is not a matter of luck but largely a matter of science; that it is not merely tickling Dame Nature till she grudgingly shares her bounties, but that it is a scientific process, the laws of which may be discovered. This means mental growth for the farmer, the stimulus of many new ideas which bring wider horizons and a larger life; and incidentally a heightened respect for his own life-work.

_What is Progressive Agriculture?_

The old-fashioned farmer, particularly in America where methods have been so wasteful because of the cheapness of land, has planted and harvested just for the season's returns, with little regard for the future. The modern farmer, self-respecting and far-sighted, plans for the future welfare of his farm. He learns how to a.n.a.lyze and treat his soil and to conserve its fertility, just as he would protect his capital in any business investment. Scientific management and farm economy are taking the place of mere soil-mining and reckless waste. The best farmers plan to leave their farms a little more fertile than they found them. Good authorities in rural economics a.s.sert that if depletion of soil fertility were taken into account, the wasteful methods of American agriculture in the past, though producing apparently large returns, have actually been unprofitable. So long as new land could easily be obtained from the government for a mere song and a few months' patience, the pioneer farmer was utterly careless in his treatment of the soil. He moved from state to state, skimming the fat of the land but never fertilizing, following the frontier line westward and leaving half-wasted lands in his trail.

It was really a blessing to the land when the scarcity of free homesteads brought this wasteful process towards its end. When new lands became scarce, the farms of the middle West increased in value. For twenty years farm values have been rising steadily, with two evident results: intensive farming and speculation. The demoralizing effects of the latter are at once apparent. It was a sad day when the prairie farmer ceased to think of his farm as a permanent home, but as a speculative a.s.set. But it was a good day for the business of farming when the farmer discovered the need of more careful, intensive cultivation to keep pace with rising values.

This marks the beginning of scientific thoroughness and efficiency in our tilling of the soil.

_Its Development by Government Patronage_

Just then something very timely happened. The modern period of American agriculture really dates from 1887, when Congress, by the Hatch Act, established the first national system of agricultural experiment stations in the world. Previous to this date there had been a few private and state enterprises; but this Act of Congress established at public expense an experiment station in every state and territory. The vast usefulness of this movement in developing a real science of agriculture is evident from this paragraph from the law:

"Sec. 2. That it shall be the object and duty of said experiment stations to conduct original researches or verify experiments on the physiology of plants and animals; the diseases to which they are severally subject, with the remedies for the same; the chemical composition of useful plants at their different stages of growth; the comparative advantages of rotative cropping, as pursued under the varying series of crops; the capacity of new plants or trees for acclimation; the a.n.a.lysis of soils and water; the chemical composition of manures, natural or artificial, with experiments designed to test their comparative effects on crops of different kinds; the adaptation and value of gra.s.ses and forage plants; the composition and digestibility of the different kinds of food for domestic animals; the scientific and economic questions involved in the production of b.u.t.ter and cheese, et cetera."

As a result of this and later laws, over three millions of dollars are now spent annually, by the national and state governments, to support experiment station work. Over a thousand men are employed in the investigations and their publications cover practically the whole range of the science and art of agriculture. About five hundred separate bulletins are issued each year, which may be obtained free on application.

This great chain of experiment stations is working wonders. In cooperation with the agricultural colleges and the U. S. Department of Agriculture, they are raising agriculture to scientific levels. They are, by their laboratory work, doing the farmer's experimenting for him and doing it better and with greater certainty. Thus they are eliminating much of the uncertainty and "luck" from farming which has been its curse and discouragement. And thus they are equipping the farmer to cope more effectively with the difficulties of nature and to put a more confident fight with stubborn climate and fickle weather, because he knows the scientific points of the game.

II. Some Special Aspects of Scientific Agriculture.

_Intensive Farming and Conservation of Fertility_

The opening of the rich prairie lands to cultivation, with the marvels of extensive agriculture, is a wonderful story. Our last chapter suggested it in outline. But _intensive_ farming has its own triumphs, though they may be less spectacular. There is something that wins our respect in the careful, thorough methods of European agriculture, by which whole nations are able to make a living on tiny farms by intensive farming. Tilling every little sc.r.a.p of ground, even roadside and dooryard, and guarding the soil fertility as the precious business capital of the family, it is wonderful how few square rods can be made to sustain a large family.

Frugality is not attractive to Americans, especially the European type which often means peasant farming, and a low scale of living. We are discovering, however, the vast possibilities of farm economy and intensive cultivation. Professor Carver says, "Where land is cheap and labor dear, wasteful and extensive farming is natural, and it is useless to preach against it.... We always tend to waste that which is cheap and economize that which is dear. The condition of this country in all the preceding periods dictated the wasteful use of land and the economic use of labor, as shown by the unprecedented development of agricultural machinery. But as land becomes dearer, relatively to labor, as it inevitably will, the tendency will be equally inevitable toward more intensive agriculture, that is, toward a system which produces more per acre. This will follow through the normal working of economic laws, as surely as water will flow down hill."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Stockman-Farmer Pub. Co._

A modern Fruit and Truck Farm in high state of fertility.]

It is wonderful what can be accomplished by intensive cultivation. If the old New England orchards were given as thorough care and treatment as the scientifically tended and doctored apple trees of Oregon, the results would surprise the oldest citizen! Conserving moisture and keeping the soil clean from weeds is worth all the painstaking care it requires. The renovation of the soil by regular fertilizing is a lesson the wasteful West is slowly learning, coupled with scientific schemes of crop rotation to conserve the soil's quality. Farmers are astonishingly slow to adopt these methods, however, thinking that they know best the needs of their own soil. The North Dakota experiment station is inducing farmers to adopt their advice as to seed selection and crop rotation with the promise to set aside five acres for experimentation in accordance with the advice given. This is extremely wise policy. Doubtless, if directions are faithfully followed, the contrast with the rest of the farm will be highly favorable to the five-acre lot and agricultural progress will win out.