158 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



11 A careful study of farm methods among Minnesota farmers dis- 

 closes this fact : Some wheat growers, with the best farm machinery, 

 and employing the best methods of agriculture, make a profit in wheat 

 raising of from ten to fifteen cents a bushel more than do their 

 less intelligent and less progressive neighbors. Now, the tendency 

 in the State and throughout the Northwest is to bring, by education 

 and a general exchange of methods, the poorer farmers up to the 

 level of the best. This change is rapidly taking place. It will not 

 require fifteen years to realize its consummation. When the methods 

 and facilities of the average farmer are brought up to the level of the 

 best of the present time, this change, with the change above noted 

 in transportation charges, will add to the average profit of Minne- 

 sota farmers in growing wheat a total of not less than fifteen and 

 possibly of over twenty cents a bushel. Such a change would more 

 than double the existing net profit of the wheat grower in the North- 

 west. Could it be maintained for a series of years, as is presupposed 

 under Mr. Atkinson's supposition of London prices, it would furnish 

 such an incentive to wheat growing in Minnesota and the surround- 

 ing territory as has as yet never been experienced. A million families 

 of immigrants would pour into the great Northwest within the next 

 twenty to twenty-five years. They would take up all the existing 

 vacant lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The lands suitable for ir- 

 rigation in these States and in Montana would beset to growing wheat. 

 The wave of humanity anxious to raise wheat for a dollar a bushel in 

 London would sweep past the boundaries of the four States men- 

 tioned, and carry the cultivation of that cereal all over Manitoba, 

 Assiniboia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. In these four British prov- 

 inces and in the four American States, dollar wheat in London would 

 in twenty years open more acres of good land to wheat than are now 

 subject to the plow within their borders. Even then the beginning 

 only would have been made to the possibilities of wheat culture in 

 the British Northwest. Settlements would not have extended as far 

 north as St. Petersburg in Russia; neither would settlers have 

 trenched upon the lands with a climate as severe as that of the Rus- 

 sian metropolis. 



" The foregoing is a brief statement of what dollar wheat in 

 London would do for one section of North America in stimulating 

 wheat cultivation. If that statement is based upon a true conception, 

 as the writer believes it is, of the possibilities of the American 

 Northwest, it demonstrates how impossible it will be to maintain 

 dollar wheat in London for any great length of time in the future. 

 It also shows that Mr. Atkinson is wrong in not asserting a sure con- 

 tinuation of that decline in wheat prices which he so fully predicted 

 in 1880." 



