The Romance of the Reaper Part 12

Through the courtesy of Mr. Harlan, of the Des Moines Historical Society, I obtained the addresses of nine old settlers, who went into Iowa with ox-carts, before 1850, and who are still living. I found that every one of them had remained on the land and was prosperous. The poorest owned $7,000, the richest $96,000; and their average wealth was $36,000.

These fortunes are not made, as in France, by sacrificial economies. The Iowan is noted as a high liver and a good spender. Here, for instance, is the menu of a chance supper I enjoyed at the home of an Iowa farmer, nine miles from Des Moines: Mashed potatoes, poached eggs, hot biscuits, white bread, fresh b.u.t.ter, honey, jelly, peaches and cream, gooseberry pie, and good coffee--all served on china, with fine linen tablecloth and napkins.

The man of the house was the son of a rack-rented Irish immigrant, who had been reared "on potatoes and salt, mostly."

I found one young county, born since the Civil War, in which five thousand farmers now own property worth seventy-five millions. They have fourteen thousand horses, seventeen thousand sheep, sixty thousand cattle, and ninety thousand hogs. In the furnishing of the homes in this county, so its Auditor informs me, more than twenty-five thousand dollars have been spent on the one item of pianos.

In a small, out-of-the-way town, called Ames, I came upon a farmers'

college--a veritable Harvard of the soil. Here, on a thousand acres which fed the wild deer and buffalo in the days of Andrew Jackson, is a college that equals Princeton and Va.s.sar combined, in the number of its pupils.

Its farm machinery building is the largest of its kind. Five professors are in charge, and it is a curious fact, showing how new the New Farmer is, that these professors are obliged to teach without a text-book. As yet, there is no such thing in the world as a text-book on farm machinery.

The Iowans pay half a million dollars a year to sustain this college. They pay it cheerfully. They pay it with a hurrah. Why? Because it is the biggest money-maker in the State. One little professor, named Holden--the smallest of the whole hundred and forty, is revered by the Iowans as a King Midas of the cornfield. He has shown them how to grow ten bushels more per acre, by using a better quality of seed. This one _idea_, in a State where every fourth dollar is a corn dollar, meant an extra twenty millions last year.

First in corn, first in farm machinery, and first in the number of her banks! That is Iowa. There are a few of her villages that have no banks, but they are conscious of their disgrace. They feel naked and ashamed. In all, there are as many banks as post-offices, very nearly; and they are crammed with enough wealth to build three Panama Ca.n.a.ls.

"Money is a trifle tight just now," said an Iowa banker. This was last September. "You see, at this time of year, the farm labourers cause a drain on the currency by keeping their wages in their pockets." This surprising fact did not seem surprising to the banker. He was himself bred on the soil--the son of a farm-hand who had become a rich farmer. But to the financiers of Europe, what an incredible thing is this--that the wages of the farm-labourers should sway the money market up and down.

The pride of Iowa is Des Moines, a city of farm-bred people. It is so young that some of its old men remember when wolf-hunting was good where its one skysc.r.a.per stands to-day. It has no ancient history and no souvenirs. A little while ago a lot of industrious people came here poor, and now they are prosperous and still busy--that is the story of Des Moines in a sentence.

In the main hall of the five-domed Capitol at Des Moines is a life-sized painting of a prairie wagon, hauled by oxen. In such a rude conveyance as this most of the early settlers rolled into Iowa, at a gait of two miles an hour. But there are no prairie wagons now, nor oxen. Ten thousand miles of railway criss-cross the State, and make more profit in three months than all the railways of ancient India made last year.

Instead of being tax-ridden serfs, these Iowans pay the total self-governing cost of their Commonwealth by handing over the price of the summer's hay. Instead of being the prey of money-lenders, they have made Des Moines the Hartford of the West, in which forty-two insurance companies carry a risk of half a billion. And so, in each one of its details, the story of these Corn Kings is staggering to a mere city-dweller, especially to anyone who has cold storage ideas about farmers.

Big Men, too, as well as big corn, are grown in Iowa. Here is a sample group--half educators and half statesmen--John B. Grinnell, Henry Smith Williams, Albert Shaw, Newell Dwight Hillis, Carl Snyder, Emerson Hough, Hamlin Garland, Senators Allison and Dolliver, Leslie M. Shaw, John A.

Ka.s.son, Horace Boies, Governor Albert B. c.u.mmins and our Official Farmer--James Wilson. There are now fifteen hundred newspaper men in Iowa.

(One of them ships seven carloads of magazines a month.) There are three hundred and fifty architects, two thousand engineers, five thousand doctors, three thousand bankers and brokers, and thirty thousand teachers.

These amazing changes have taken place within the memory of men and women who are now alive.

"I can remember when the first mowing-machine was made in our county,"

said Governor c.u.mmins, who is still far from being a man of years.

"I walked eight miles through the forest and sold eggs for three cents a dozen and b.u.t.ter for four cents a pound," said John Cownie--a well-known figure at the Des Moines Capitol.

One short half-century, and here is the whole paraphernalia of a high civilisation--a fruitage which has usually required the long cultivation of a thousand years.

And Iowa is not a freak State. A traveller hears the same story--from ox-cart to automobile, in almost every region of the prairie West. The various States are only patches of one vast gra.s.sy plain where

"painted harvesters, fleet after fleet, Like yachts, career through seas of waving wheat."

"My first experience with the 'New Farmer,' as you call him, was in Texas," said a Kansas City business man. "I had taken an agency for harvesters in a section of Texas that was bigger than several dozen Vermonts, and I made my headquarters in a town called Amarillo. The first morning I went into the bank to get acquainted. While I was there in came a big, roughly dressed man. 'Come here, Bill,' said the banker. 'Maybe you want some farm machinery.'

"'Maybe I do,' said the big fellow; so I gave him a catalogue and went on talking with the banker.

"Ten minutes later the big fellow looked up from the catalogue and asked--'How much do you want for ten of these binders?' I nearly had a spell of heart failure, but I gasped the price. He said--'all right; send 'em along.'

"'Don't you worry about Bill's credit,' said the banker, seeing I looked dazed. 'He has more than $100,000 in this bank right now.'

"This was my cue to get busy with the big farmer, and before he left the bank he had bought a thresher, four traction engines and half a dozen ploughs."

Harvesting by machinery has actually become cheaper than the ancient method of harvesting by slaves. This surprising fact was first brought to the notice of Europeans during the Chicago World's Fair, when forty-seven foreign Commissioners were taken to the immense Dalrymple farm in North Dakota. Here they saw a wheat-field very nearly a hundred square miles in extent, with three hundred self-binders clicking out the music of the harvest. There were no serfs--no drudges--no barefooted women. And yet they were told that the labour-cost of reaping the wheat was LESS THAN A CENT A BUSHEL.

It has now become impossible to reap the world's wheat by hand. As well might we try to carry coal from mines to factories in baskets. Merely to have gathered in our own cereal and hay of last year's growing, would have been a ten days' job for every man and woman in the United States, between the ages of twenty and twenty-six. But even if it had been possible to return to hand-labour, in the production of the world's wheat, the extra cost would have swollen, last year, to a total of $330,000,000--so I am told by a Wisconsin professor who has made a careful study of the costs of harvesting. This amount is more than equal to the entire revenue of the International Harvester Company, in the five years of its existence.

Roughly speaking, the time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been reduced from sixty-one hours to three, by the use of machinery. Hay now requires four hours, instead of twenty-one; oats seven hours, instead of sixty-six; and potatoes thirty-eight hours, instead of one hundred and nine.

It is machinery that has so vastly increased the size of the average American farm. In India, where a farmer's whole outfit can be bought for ten dollars, the average farm is half an acre or less. In France and Germany it is five acres. In England it is nine. But in the United States--the home of farm machinery, it is one hundred and fifty acres.

Very little has been written about this stupendous prosperity of American farmers. Why? Because it is so recent. The Era of Big Profits began barely ten years ago. There was a time when the blue-ribbon New Farmer was the man who grew wheat in the Red River Valley. He was the aristocrat of the West. His year's work was no more than a few weeks of ploughing and sowing, and a few days of harvesting. Even this was done easily, sitting on the seat of a machine and driving a team of splendid horses. After harvest, he cashed in, carried a big cheque to the bank, and settled down for a long loaf or a trip to the old homestead in the East.

But it was the bad year of 1893 that first put the farmers, the country over, on the road to affluence. Up to that time it was their usual policy to depend upon a single crop. One farmer planted nothing but wheat; another planted nothing but corn; a third nothing but cotton; and so on.

But in 1893 the prices of wheat, corn, and cotton fell so low that the farmers' profits were wiped out. This disaster set the farmers thinking; and in four years they had changed over to the new policy of _Diversified Farming_.

Instead of putting all their work upon one crop, they planted from three to a dozen different crops each year. They manufactured their corn into cattle. They gave the soil a square deal in the matter of fertilisation.

They learned to plant better seed and to pay attention to the Weather Bureau. They studied the market reports. And, best of all, they swung over from muscle to machinery, until to-day the value of the machinery on American farms is fully a thousand millions.

All this amazing progress that I have been describing is by no means the best that the New Farmer will do. It is merely what he has done by the aid of machinery. What he will do by the aid of SCIENCE remains to be seen.

Scientific agriculture is young. It has had to wait until machinery prepared the way, by giving the farmers time to think, and money to spend.

The first scientist who took notice of farming was the Frenchman, Lavoisier. He found out the composition of water in 1783, and was in the midst of many discoveries, when a Paris mob hustled him to the guillotine.

The famous Liebig next appeared and founded the first agricultural experiment station. Then came Berthelot--the father of synthetic chemistry, with his sensational announcement--"The soil is alive."

To-day the New Farmer finds himself touched by Science on all sides. He knows that there are more living things in one pinch of rich soil than there are people on the whole globe. He knows that he can take half a dozen handfuls of earth from different parts of his farm, mix them together, send one thimbleful to a chemist, and find out exactly the kind of crop that will give him the best harvest. And more, now that science has given him a peep into Nature's factory, he can even feel a sense of kinship between himself and his acres, because he knows that the same elements that redden his blood are painting the green hues on his fields and forests.

There are now fifteen thousand New Farmers who have graduated from agricultural colleges; and since the late Professor W. C. At.w.a.ter opened the first American experiment station in 1875, fifty others have sprung into vigorous life. There is also at Washington an Agricultural Department which has become the greatest aggregation of farm-scientists in the world.

To maintain this Department Uncle Sam pays grudgingly eleven millions a year. He pays much more than this to give food and blankets to a horde of lazy Indians, or for the building of two or three warships. But it is at least more than is being spent on the New Farmer in any other country.

Step by step farming is becoming a sure and scientific profession. The risks and uncertainties that formerly tossed the farmer back and forth, between hope and despair, are being mastered. The Weather Bureau, which sent half a million warnings last year to the farmers, has already become so skilful that six-sevenths of its predictions come true. In Kansas, wheat-growing has become so sure that there has been no failure for thirteen years. And in the vast South-West, the trick of irrigation is changing the man-killing desert into a Farmers' paradise, where there is nothing so punctual as the crops.

Already gasolene engines are in use among the New Farmers. The International Harvester Company made twenty-five thousand of them last year at Milwaukee, without supplying the demand. These engines, in the near future, will be operated with alcohol, which the farmers can distil from potatoes at a cost of ten cents a gallon. This is no dream, as there are now six thousand alcohol engines in use on the farms of Germany alone.

When this Age of Alcohol arrives, the making of the New Farmer will be very nearly complete. _He will then grow his own power, and know how to harness for his own use the omnipotence of the soil._