292 AXMAL REPORT OF TIIK Off. Doc. 



made it im])().s.sil>le to secure profitable liai-vests from a great deal 

 of land that a few years earlier was regarded as satisfactory in its 

 returns. For instance, in 1890 a yield of live bushels of wheat to the 

 acre gave the grower fair profits under the conditions of that time, 

 for each plow could lit the ground for from three hundred to five 

 hundred acres, per season and fifteen hundred bushels at sixty 

 cents a bushel gave the grower some $oOU profit. Now, to a family 

 which before this had hardly earned $300 in a lifetime, a five-bushel- 

 an-acre crop on three hundred acres was a small fortune. In 1900 

 the cost of production had risen to a point that made it necessary 

 to secure at least ten bushels per acre to clear anything over |150 

 on a three-hundred acre crop. But this profit was less than the 

 wages a harvest hand could earn in the season of about a hundred 

 days, for his wages were then from four to five dollars a day and 

 ''found," with work seven days a week. A good many farmers have 

 made crops since 1900 at an actual loss or on a very small margin 

 of profit, for the average yield of wheat for the Pampas as a whole 

 is less than ten bushels an acre, although there are some districts 

 That give more than fifty bushels to the acre in good years. 



Then there was witnessed the curious spectacle of tens of thou- 

 sands of farm laborers crossing the ocean from Mediterranean Eu- 

 rope after harvest in their own lands with sickle and the tramping 

 out of the grain by the hoofs of farm animals, to work a third of 

 a year later with the header and steam thresher in the grain fields 

 of Southern South America. Although the climate was congenial, 

 food was lavishly provided, and w^ages were from eight to twelve 

 times as high as in the old countries, in the south of Europe, few 

 of these men could be induced to remain on the Pampas to become 

 citizens after the observations and experiences of one or two seasons. 

 Many of them make the trip from the Mediterranean to the La Plata 

 year after year, but having both heard of and seen the ''trickery of 

 the natives," they decline to step over the bounds of protection 

 given by the official representatives of their own countries, and re- 

 turn to their native lands at the end of the harvest period. 



The boom in stock and grain production quite naturally led to a 

 boom in land values, so that by 1905 farm land in all parts of the 

 Pampas Avas even dearer, i)roportionately, than land of the same 

 class in our own Mississippi Valley stock and grain states. If 

 prices had remained reasonable, and if small farms in desirable dis- 

 tricts could have been bought, harvest hands and other immigrant 

 farmers would undoubtedly have been tempted to purchase proper- 

 ties and become citizens of the Pampas countries, thus giving a 

 further impetus to their agricultural development. But the good 

 land is largely in possession of the aristocratic native families, and 

 generally they will not sell off farms of a few hundred acres. The 

 general policy is to rent tenants several hundred acres each for a 

 few years, often three, four or five, for the growing of grain, with 

 the proviso that at the end of the term the land is to be seeded to 

 alfalfa. Government lands, usually undesirable on account of their 

 low fertility or because of their difficulty of access, are being sold 

 in small farms. Many of these are fit only for grazing and offer 

 insufficient inducements to ambitious immigrants. 



In this brief survey of South American agriculture, we see that the 

 continent has an imperial domain of farm lands waiting to be devel- 



