322 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



6. A better knowledge of the laws pertaining to the fertility of 

 the soil and the means of maintaining it. 



7. New uses for agricultural products, and methods of manu- 

 facture involving chemical science, such as the manufacture of 

 glucose from grain, sugar from beets, oil and glycerine from 

 lard, etc. 



It will be seen that the most of these are aids to all farmers 

 ahke. The one great agricultural advantage which the West has 

 over us is, that they have a great breadth of fertile soil easily 

 tilled. When we have said this we have said all. Modern meth- 

 ods of transportation put that land into competition with ours, 

 which is harder to till, and, as a whole, less productive for grain. 

 Practically the cause of the competition is in the modern facilities 

 for the cheap transportation of agricultural products, so let us con- 

 trast the old with the new condition of things. 



Until the days of modern railroads the profitable transportation 

 of any of the cruder agricultural products for any considerable 

 distance in this country was impossible. Roads were poor, popu- 

 lation sparse, and land abundant enough so that even poor crops 

 would feed the people. Even now it very rarely pays to carry by 

 land the agricultural products of any region more than a very few 

 miles by the methods employed before railroads came to be used. 

 In connection with my work for the census office, on the production 

 of cereal grains in the United States, I spent much labor in trying 

 to find out how much it cost the farmers to haul their grain to 

 market by wagons. Numerous answers came in, of course varying 

 widely, but the majority of answers were from half a cent to a cent 

 per bushel per mile for wheat. Very many were above a cent per 

 bushel. I take the majority, and in the grain-growing regions. 

 Now at that rate the transportation of a crop soon eats up its 

 profits, and that was the condition everywhere before we had rail- 

 roads. Then grain could only be carried any considerable distance 

 where there was means of water carriage. Wo do not appreciate 

 how isolated the outermost settlements were before railroads. 

 Parkinson tells of (Tour in America, I, p. 156), meeting in 1798 

 near Philadelphia a wagon with five horses. The man had come 

 350 miles to the Philadelphia market with nine barrels of flour 

 and two sheep. The flour at that time sold at seven dollars a 

 barrel, but he had to have some money to buy things that could not 

 be made at home. Our first rebellion, the farmers' " whiskey in- 

 .surrection," under Washington's administration, grew out of the 



