SOME PRESENT PROBLEMS . 729 



cable, even though in some cases I have followed very closely the 

 ideas and the language of my informants. I shall be obliged to assume 

 full responsibility for the statements. 1 



The Technical Agricultural Problems 



Iii America the so-called problems of agriculture have been largely 

 those of the mere conquest of land. They are the result of migration 

 and of the phenomenal development of sister industries. They have 

 resulted from a growing, developing country. They have been largely 

 physical, mechanical, transportational, extraneous -- the problems 

 of the engineer and inventor rather than of the farmer. The problem 

 has not been to make two blades of grass grow where only one grew 

 before, but how economically to harvest and transport the one blade 

 that has grown almost without effort. 



During the past hundred years there has been an area of develop- 

 ment on the western border of the country, and this border has 

 been able to compete at an economical advantage with the older area 

 farther east. The price of land has fallen in the East, while it has 

 risen in the West. From 1870 to 1900 we practically doubled our 

 population and doubled our agricultural area. Aside from the geo- 

 metrical increase in the population, this development has been due 

 largely to a fertile, level, practically treeless prairie. Hitherto the 

 axeman had hewn his way tree by tree. The development of the area 

 west of the Mississippi River is probably the most remarkable in the 

 history of the world. A second cause for this development is the 

 consolidation of railroads into transcontinental lines; and another 

 is the improvement of labor-saving machinery, of which the self- 

 binding harvester is the most conspicuous example, a machine that 

 first attracted wide attention at the Centennial Exposition in 1876. 



To this day the American is a cheap-land farmer. A few minutes on 

 the train from a European city brings one into a highly tilled agri- 

 cultural country. The other day I took an express train from New 

 York City. It was three quarters of an hour before I saw what I could 

 call a farm, and a full hour before I reached a farming country. 



As early as one hundred years ago, a distinct movement for the 

 betterment of agriculture had set in. This movement was largely 

 educational. It was an effort to improve the farmer quite as much as 

 to improve the farm. Washington was vitally interested in the pro- 

 blem. He wished to have a central board or clearing-house for agri- 

 cultural information. The full fruition of his hopes came with the 

 establishment of a secretaryship of agriculture in the President's 

 cabinet, in Benjamin Harrison's administration. In 1799 a concrete 



1 I am under special obligations to my colleagues, Professors Hunt and Lanman, 

 and to one of my students, Mr. Charles Aronovici. 



