768 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Again, let it be remembered that Texas will produce a cotton crop, 

 marketed in 1898-'99, above the average of the five ante-war crops of 

 the whole country, and nearly equal to the largest crop ever grown 

 in the United States before the war. Texas could not only pro- 

 duce the present entire cotton crop of the United States but of 

 the world, on but a small part of her land which is well suited to 

 cotton. When these facts are considered, perhaps the potential of 

 that great State in wheat and other grain, in cattle and in sheep, as 

 well as in cotton, may begin to be comprehended. 



The writer is well aware that this treatment of a great problem 

 is very incomplete, but it is the best that the leisure hours of a very 

 busy business life would permit. If it discloses the general ignorance 

 of our resources, the total inadequacy of many of our official statistics, 

 the lack of any real agricultural survey, and the necessity for a reor- 

 ganization and concentration of the scientific departments of the Gov- 

 ernment as well as of a permanent census bureau, it will have served a 

 useful purpose. 



If it also serves to call attention to the meager average crops and 

 the poor quality of our agriculture as a whole down to a very recent 

 period, it may suggest even to those to whose minds the statistics of 

 the past convey but gloomy and " doubtful views " of the future, that 

 the true progress in scientific agriculture could only begin when sub- 

 stantially all the fertile land in the possession of the Government had 

 either been given away or otherwise distributed. So long as " sod 

 crops " and the single-crop system yielded adequate returns to un- 

 skilled farmers, no true science of agriculture could be expected, any 

 more than a large product of wool can be hoped for in States where 

 it has been wittily said that " every poor man keeps one cur dog, and 

 every d — d poor man keeps two or more." 



Finally, if I shall have drawn attention to the very effective 

 work which is being done in the agricultural experiment stations 

 by men of first-rate ability, I shall have drawn attention to a great 

 fact. This work has already led to a complete revolution from the 



the insurance, and, when summer fallow is introduced, the cost of the summer fallow. Suffice 

 it that these figures for 1898— a year of high charge for seed and one which yielded a fraction 

 over the average in product — prove conclusively an average of all charges of less than five 

 dollars an acre for the cost of the product. In different years under these conditions the 

 cost of the wheat varies from a little over twenty cents to approximately thirty-five cents 

 per bushel. The cost of oats, which are cultivated with the wheat mainly for use on the 

 farms, ranges from ten to fifteen cents per bushel. 



These are facts. The pending question in this discussion is, How much land, occu- 

 pied by owners but not now in use, is there in this section of the country on which similar 

 results can be attained, with better results by individual farmers who possess mental energy 

 and practical skill ? The figures given by the chiefs of the agricultural experiment stations 

 may rightly be taken in the solution of this question. 



