462 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE REORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN FARMING 



Br Professor HOMER C. PRICE 



THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY 



FROM the beginning, American agriculture has been characterized 

 by its extensiveness rather than its intensiveness. Land has 

 been more abundant than labor and, in the aggregate, more has been 

 derived from a small yield on a large acreage than could have been 

 realized from a large yield on a small acreage. The yields of American 

 farm crops have been proverbially small, but the total production has 

 been exceptionally large and, as a rule, the countries producing the 

 largest amounts of farm crops have the smallest yields per acre. This 

 fact is illustrated in the following table : 



Table showing the Average Yield of Wheat per Acre by Ten- year Periods 

 for the last twenty years and the total production for 1908 



Avr. Yield per Avr. Yield per m . , „ , . . 



-ooo n „ . ,„„„ ,„„_ Total Production 

 Acre, 1888-97 Acre, 1898-1907 



United Kingdom 30.1 bu. 32.6 bu. 55,585,000 bu. 



Germany 22.7 28.4 138,442,000 



France 17.6 20.8 310,526,000 



United States 12.8 13.9 664,602,000 



The above table also reveals the fact that the production per acre 

 when compared by ten-year periods has been increasing in all the 

 countries. Much has been said and is being written about the decline 

 in agricultural production, but statistics do not show that there has 

 been any decline, but rather a marked increase when the productions of 

 the leading countries are compared and using the production of wheat, 

 which is the most universally grown farm crop, as the basis for 

 comparison. 



The intensity of culture always bears a direct relation to the density 

 of population and while it is difficult to get a comparable basis of com- 

 parison between countries on account of the varying proportions of 

 waste land in different countries and different methods of classifying 

 statistics, the following table represents the most reliable figures avail- 

 able and, when compared with the preceding table, shows that the yield 

 of wheat per acre varies directly as the density of population. 



Number of Acres per Capita 



United Kingdom l-"° acres. 



Germany 2.37 acres. 



France 3 - 40 acres - 



United States' (exclusive of Alaska and Philippines) 24.02 acres. 



