I

N THE past two decades the Mexican Gulf Coast country has come into its own. Several of its records in the way of crop production during this time have been so phenominal as to be almost beyond belief.

And right now this development is moving more rapidly than ever before.

The gulf coast spoken of is that crescentshaped coastal plain lying on the Gulf of Mexico and extending from the Delta of the Mississippi in which the City of New Orleans is located, to the Delta of the Rio Grande, in which the City of Brownsville is located. Between them there lies a long belt of land facing the Mexico gulf made up of alluvial soil that has been deposited through the ages by the great rivers which have been at work on the job since prehistoric times.

During the past twelve years the development of this section has been something marvelous and the results seem more magical than the best stories of ancient lore.

Twelve years ago the sole productions for other markets, that is, in money crops, were cattle and lumber and an inconsiderable amount of rice, sugar and cotton. In those days no man thought of wealth except from cattle and lumber, the rice and sugar and cotton industries even then being looked upon as industries for small fry investors and theoretical experimenters.

Today the lumber and cattle barons are second in rank in the nobility of that section. Now there are dukes of rich estates with great fields of high-priced truck, celery, cauliflower, lettuce, cabbage, beans, potatoes, radishes and other vegetables which the northern markets absorb in terms of thousands of cars annually. There are orchard kings and their coffers are bulging with the proceeds of orange, strawberry and fig crops. There are acres as far as the eye can see, dotted with green hills of watermelon and canteloupe vines, and their products can be found in every market north of the Ohio. Thousands of acres that formerly were considered to do their full duty by sustaining a long horn cow apiece, now feed a

couple of dozen people on succulent vegetables and the finest fruits, and have enough unsaleable surplus to feed a short horn cow apiece. A hundred dollars to five hundred dollars per acre, according to the wit and intelligence of the worker, now comes from these fertile alluvial acres that have been lying fallow and untouched since the creation.

But more: the rice industry is steadily making its way westward, and where the pine tree stood and the long horn grazed in the past, the land is seamed like a checkerboard with irrigation canals and four hundred thousand acres bring regularly forth a great store of rice for the subsistence of mankind. Sugar production is now seen on the extreme west of the gulf coast belt in the vicinity of Brownsville, and it can be said that this section produces more cane sugar than all of the rest of the United States. But in the enumeration of food products of this section the story is not yet told. In the matter of sea foods, fish, oysters, shrimp, turtles and terrapin, the gulf coast feeds the western half of the United States, and preparations are now being made by the United States government for a great fish hatchery near Galveston to augment the production of sea foods; likewise the state government has passed stringent laws to preserve them. The gulf coast farmer grows his own tobacco and has discovered that the heretofore useless disintegrated sea shell found in vast quantities along the coast, not only makes the best wagon roads in the world, but is a most valuable fertilizer which he can obtain from the state for ten cents per ton.

In this section eight million barrels of crude petroleum are produced annually and furnishes a fuel for every contrivance from cook stove to traction engine. The farmer gets even his disinfectants at home, as the largest deposits of sulphur in the United States lie at his door, and hundreds of thousands of barrels are shipped annually. The great rivers furnish him waters for irrigation, and thousands of wells furnish him natural gas and artesian water.

"Zone" advertising is a scheme

hit upon by pub lishers of national mediums in order to get business from advertisers who could not use all their circulation. The plan is to divide their editions so that the advertiser can cover certain territories or zones which are favorable to his selling plans. Naturally, the adver

tiser who uses a few zones does not pay as much as the man who has his ad inserted in the edition going to all the circulation.

The truth is that this idea was utilized by Jas. M. Pierce, publisher

of Pierce's Farm Weeklies, as early

lished primarily for the farmers of Iowa. He therefore bought two well-established papers-one in Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Farmer, and another one at Kansas City, Mo., the Farmer and Stockman.

as 1893. At that time Mr. Pierce, who had been publisher of the Iowa Homestead for some seven or eight years and was seeking circulation for it over the entire Central West, came to the realization that intensive cultivation of its own special field was the ideal editorial policy of an agricultural weekly. In fact, he found it would be impossible to render adequate services to the varied interests of the farmers of Wisconsin and Kansas by a farm paper pub

The Wisconsin Farmer was established in 1848, having been known during the fifties and the early sixties as the Wisconsin

Farmer and Northwestern Cultivator. It had several changes of

editors and pub

lishers during its

early career, the

most prominent being Governor J.

W. Hoyt, who recently died in Washington, D. C., at the advanced age of eighty-four years. Governor Hoyt took an exceedingly prominent part in Wisconsin affairs and did much for the state's agricultural development. A review of an early issue of the Wis

consin Farmer shows that it early pointed out the advantages and profits to be derived from both dairying and horticulture, both of which industries have added materially in subsequent years to make Wisconsin famous.

The Farmer and Stockman of Kansas City was fifteen years old when Mr. Pierce purchased it. Among its former editors was Hon. F. D. Coburn, for many years secretary of the State Board of Agriculture of Kansas. During