almost every state in the Union it is the all engrossing question of the hour. The much despised "Book Farmer" is coming into his own. A few years ago the experts of our Agricultural Colleges spoke to deaf ears. Today they are everywhere leading the fight for better crops and better live stock, and our farmers are listening eagerly. Second only to the work of the Agricultural Colleges is the work of our great railroads, our bankers and business men big and little-giving freely of their means to aid in spreading the gospel of better farming from one end of the land to the other. Last spring a great Chicago mail order house set aside a million dollars for this purpose and a few days ago the International Harvester Company followed suit with another million-placing in charge of its newly created Agricultural Bureau Holden, the great Corn Evangelist of Iowa. A new sun is rising in the East and with it come glad tidings to the nearly one hundred million souls who are struggling for a livelihood within the confines of our blessed Republic. The dawn of greater American Agriculture means a broader and better rural life. It means better country schools, churches and highways. It means a country home filled with good literature, pictures and music. It means less drudgery for the farmer's wife and daughter and a more inviting prospect for his son to remain permanently on the farm. To the teeming millions who are compelled to earn their living in our big cities it means plenty of wholesome things to eat and wear at a cost within their reach. To our business interests and to the manufacturer it means a greater and more permanent prosperity. The problem of a more successful agriculture is therefore indeed the overshadowing question of the hour. Upon it depends not merely our national prosperity, but the contentment of the masses, good citizenship and good health. So long as the average man's pantry is filled with good things to eat and his wardrobe with wholesome clothes to wear, the spectral sentinel who walks the banks of the Potomac can say as he said in other days of sainted memory: "All's well." The Chicago Daily Lire Stock World has the largest paid in advance independent subscription list of any daily farm paper. Readers believe in it. "World" Bldg., Chicago. (Adv.) About a half century ago Queen Victoria ordered Ridgways, the world famous Tea Merchants, of London, to prepare for her personal use, a blend of over a dozen different kinds of Tea, which perfectly suited her Majesty's taste. This te was named "Her Majesty's Blend" and it was used by Queen Victoria, regularly, during the last 45 years of her reign. Exactly the same tea has been sold for a half century, and is now sold to the most discriminating tea drinkers in the world, including the Emperor of Germany, the King of Bulgaria and tens of thousands of others in Europe and America. Sherry's, Fifth Avenue, New York, used "Her Majesty's Blend" exclusively for the five o'clock teas of New York's four hundred for over twenty years. The leadieg American grocers now sell it. Now Is the Time F In the South lies the biggest opening for educational advertising that the civilized world offers today. The West knows what it wants; the East has what it wants—the South alone is diffident as to its own spending power. Here lies the opportunity for the Northern manufacturer. This is the biggest year the South has ever known. It is a year of tremendous plenty. Raw material with a golden value, far over $2,000,000 for farm products alone-this is the South of today -the grandest South the country has ever seen. -Here Are The Farm Pa The South is agricultural to the core. 83% of its population is rural. South, therefore, is to advertise to the great numbers of farmers and Progressive Circulation 147,035 BIRMINGHAM, ALA. Southern Circulation 85,000 Rate 30c per Line -- till Oct. 1, 1913 NASHVILLE, TENN. These great agricultural papers put at your command, practically without duplication, over 300,000 homes of the best type. These are the farm homes where the best class of machinery will find a sale; where automobiles in ever-increasing numbers will be found; where a market is ready for education along the lines of the fireless cooker, the electric washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, and a number of other household conveniences. There is great reason to believe that the South will offer the best field ready-to-wear clothing. Good furniture also has a ready sale in the CHICAGO Mallers Building yet for JOHN M. BRAN ST. L Chemical For You to Capture ern Trade Now is pre-eminently the time for the Northern manufacturer to capture the Southern trade. In the very near future the South will be having many manufacturers of its own-and then its territory will be closed to you forever. But the men who win the South today will have it for indefinite years to come, because the very conservatism of the Southern people will safeguard the interests of those who are first in the field. pers To Help You Win Its cities are comparatively small. The obvious way to dominate the landowners in the farm papers they read and in which they believe. Southern Circulation 46,682 Southern Circulation 25,000 South and needs only appropriate advertisements to land it in The South must be reached by localized advertising. Its climatic Advertise to the people of the South in the mediums they read, HAM COMPANY resentatives UIS Building NEW YORK By GEORGE B. WALDRON, A. M. THIN a century this nation has multilied nearly twentyfold in population nd almost a hundred fold in wealth. Has the food supply kept pace with the growing needs and is there serious danger of shortage in the future? Questions like these are disturbing to many people who never heard of Malthus and his pessimistic theories. In a recent article of the author's drawing comparisons for sixty years in American farming, it was shown that while there has been a relative falling off in the amount of land set apart for farming, the acreage of improved lands has actually increased more rapidly than the population. The last ten years has shown marked advances in the prices of farm products, and the natural implication would be that this uplifting is in part at least due to relative decrease in production. The object of this article is to investigate this phase of our farm questions. Admitting without question the rapid advance in values of farm products during the last decade, let us confine our attention strictly to the matter of quantities. The following table, adapted from a recent census publication, is extremely suggestive: Changes in Farm Products for Ten Years. Quantities 1909. 2,552,189,630 Products. Corn (bu.).. Wheat (bu.). Oats (bu.). Barley (bu.). Rye (bu.).. Buckwheat (bu.). Kaffir corn (bu.) Emmer and Spelt (bu.). Rough rice (bu.)..... Total cereals (bu.).. Hay and forage (tons). Potatoes (bu.). Sweet potatoes (bu.). Tobacco (lbs.)... Cotton (bales). *Minus sign shows decrease. Produced. 1899. 2,666,324,370 A study of the table shows that production of crops on the whole has not kept pace with population. For the ten years the population of Continental United States, which is also the limit of the above table of production, increased from 75,994,575 in 1900 to 91,972,266 in 1910, a gain of 21.0 per cent for the decade. The column of increase per cent in the table shows the extent to which crop production has kept up. Taking cereals as a whole, which make up a large part of the values of the above crops, it is plain that while there has been a small increase in the product (1.7 per cent) it has fallen far short of the 21 per cent gain in population. To state the matter in another way, 683,379,259 population has gained about twelve times as .1,007,142,980 fast in the decade as cereal products, and the 173,344,212 per capita production has fallen from over 58 bushels in 1899 to 49 bushels in 1909. Corn is the most valuable cereal crop of the nation and in this there was an actual decrease, amounting to 114,134,740 bushels, or 4.3 per cent. 29,520,457 4,512,564,465 97,453,735 389,194,965 59,232,070 1,055,764,806 10,549,268 Per Capita 1909. Increase per ct. 4.3* 27.8 1899. 35.1 All the other products included in the above table, with the single exception of cotton, show larger increase than the gain in population. This is notably the case with potatoes and there is a safe margin in hay and forage crops and in tobacco. The answer to the above conclusions might be that there is often a wide variation in farm products in a single year, and that it is not fair to make the comparisons on so limited a basis. Let us compare the two principal grain crops, corn and wheat, on a wider basis and see if the results are similar. In 1909 corn made up 56.6 per cent of all the cereals raised, and wheat 15.5 per cent, or more than 72 per cent for the two. Whatever is true of corn and wheat, therefore, may be taken as the present tendency as to food supplies of the nation. The table that follows gives certain facts as to corn for decennial periods beginning with 1840. Wherever possible the figures are three year averages, and are so indicated in the table. Seventy Years of Corn Production. Bushels Raised. Total. Years. 1840 1850 1860 1869-71. 1879-81.. 1889-91. 1899-01. 1909-11... Per Cap. 22.1 25.5 26.7 377,531,875 592,071,104 838,792,740 949,032,516* 24.6 *Average yearly yield. In the above table by taking averages of three years for the last four periods the variations of a single year are avoided. The column of total production shows how our corn crop has increased in seventy years from 377 million bushels in 1840 to a present average of 2,656 million bushels. This is a remarkable showing. Now look at the per capita production. Here for forty years the movement was also upward. Beginning with 22 bushels per capita in 1840 the amount advanced to 31 bushels in 1880, and continued at about that rate for more than ten years. In 1900 we were raising an average of 27.6 bushels per capita and the present rate is almost 29 bushels (28.9), which is materially higher than ten years ago, but somewhat short of the rate of ten to twenty years earlier. Our largest exports of corn were made in 1900 when we sent out 213 million bushels. We exported almost as much, 212 million bushels. in 1898. Our recent exports have been much smaller, being 65 millions last year and only 38 million bushels for each of the two years before. Production of wheat in the United States is shown by the table that follows: Wheat Raising for Seventy Years. This table presents very interesting results. Seventy years ago the nation was raising little if any more wheat than was needed for home consumption. And ten years later the average per capita was even smaller. Then began a more rapid expansion, until with 5.5 bushels per capita in 1860 we were getting a surplus above home needs, and ten years later, with a whole bushel more to each person we were able to let 30 million bushels a year go to feed other nations. By 1880 we were raising our largest per capita crops of wheat, amounting to nearly nine bushels to each person. This is nearly twice as much as is ordinarily required for home consumption and the country was exporting about 125 million bushels a year. During the next twenty years the gain in wheat production was nearly as rapid as the increase in population, so that by 1900 we were still raising 8.5 bushels per capita and our exports were averaging 200 million bushels a year. These have been the crowning years in American wheat raising. The bumper crop in our history was raised in 1901, amounting to 748,460,218 bushels. The next largest yield was in 1906 at 735,260,970 bushels. The average yield for the past three years has been large, over 648 million bushels, but it appears evident that we reached our probable limit in wheat raising ten years ago. Our heaviest exports in wheat were in 1902 when we sent away 234 million bushels, but with a small crop in 1904 we exported only 44 million bushels the next year, and in 1911, with an average yield, our exports were only 69 million bushels. At the present tendencies within ten years more we will find it difficult to raise as much wheat on American farms as we shall need for our own use and shall be looking across the Canadian border for help. From our study of these two principal cereal food crops it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that to some degree at least the nation is approaching the period when its food supplies will not keep pace with growths of population that have heretofore prevailed. We are certainly far away as yet from serious dangers of shortage, only near enough to possible danger on this return tide to make it desirable that every effort be made to get the maximum results from the farms of the nation. |