457 
IS PRODUCTION DECLINING ? 
Agricultural speakers and writers often give the impression, without 
positive assertion, that we produce less in proportion to population than 
formerly. If this is so, we eat less than formerly, for we export more. 
But no intelligent person, after due deliberation, will assert that we feed 
less to farm-animals or live less generously ourselves than our fathers 
fed and fared. A statistical answer in the negative has been made by the 
Statistician of this Department, in an address delivered before the 
Agricultural Congress at its last session in Philadelphia, as follows: 
There are problems presented daily which only agricultural statistics can solve, and 
upon which largely depends the future prosperity of the farming interest. We cannot 
here enumerate them, but a reference to one or two may suffice. The inqniry has been 
often made of late, Is production declining? It has been assumed that we produce in 
proportion to population less of the great staples of production than formerly. It is 
the province of agricultural statistics to decide the question. The census alone can- 
not determine it. Such is the fluctuation in rate of yield, that the supply of a given 
staple may be actually increasing, while the product of the census-year may be less 
than in its predecessor ten years before. For instance, corn for 1869 was returned 
760,944,549 bushels, and in 1859 the figures were 838,792,742. It has often been asserted, 
on the strength of these returns, that corn-production was declining, not only per 
capita, but in absolute comparison of quantity. Is it so? The year 1869 witnessed 
what in country parlance is called “ a failure” of the corn-crop. It is plainly folly to 
take such a crop for comparison. And this fact illustrates the absolute necessity of 
annual estimates to supplement decennial returns. Since 1869 there have been six 
harvests exclusive of the present one. Of these six, the largest and smallest stand in 
juxtaposition: the one in 1875, the largest ever made, is 1,321,000,000 bushels; and the 
other, another failure, in 1874, 850,000,000 bushels. The increase in a single years 
56 percent. In 1870 and 1872 the product was nearly 1,100,090,000; the average of 
annual estimates, for the six years since the census, 1,047,000,000 bushels; and this 
confirms the opinion, founded on careful study of the history of cropping in 1869, that 
if was scarcely more than three-fourths of a full crop. Now, let us examine a period 
of twenty-six years. Woe find that the yield per capita iu 1849 was 25.5 bushels; in 
1859, 26.6 bushels; and in 1869, the year of a three-fourths crop, 19.7 bushels—the same 
result as that deduced from the period since that census. If we take the year 1375, 
the result is excessive, 30 bushels per capita, but include it in the period of six years 
past, and we have 25.5—precisely the supply of 1849. 
As ta wheat, a general deduction from comparison of census exhibits is less erro- 
neons. The increase in round numbers was from 100,000,000 to 173,000,000, and again 
in 1869 to 287,000,000. Now, the latter was a large crop, yet the average for the six 
subsequent crops is 266,000,000, while the estimate for the last year of the six was 
292,000,000. Distributed according to population, there were 4.3 bushels per head in 
1849, 5.5 in 1859, 7.46 in 1869, and for the period since 6.6 bushels. This shows an in- 
crease of more than 50 per cent. in the proportion of supply in twenty-six years, and is 
exactly in accordance with the history of the several crop-years, and is a proof of the 
substantial correctness of these estimates. 
The export tigures illustrate further the fact of the large increase of wheat-produc- 
tion. The total export of wheat and flour in fifty years is equivalent to 1,062,000,000 
bushels of wheat, of which 91,000,000 were shipped during a single year, 1874. The 
exports of one-half of this period up to 1850 were only 178,000,000—less than twice those 
of 1874. The heavy increase during recent years is especially noteworthy, nearly half 
this semi-centennial aggregate having been shipped in ten years. While our popula- 
tion has nearly doubled since 1849, the quantity of all cereals taken together has 
more than doubled. The census reported 867,000,000 bushels. Allowing something 
for incompleteness of that enumeration, the 2,000,000,000 bushels produced in 1875 
allow a distribution of 46 bushels to each inhabitant, in place of 37.4 census-bushels, 
or possibly 40, with a complete enumeration. Our average supply since the last cen- 
sus exceeds 40 bushels; and thus is demonstrated the remarkable fact that, with our 
rapid increase in numbers, perhaps without a parallel, we not only keep up our high 
standard of cereal production, but actually advance it. This is owing to our vast 
areas in instant readiness for the plow, to our advance in variety and perfection of 
agricultural machinery, and to the stimulus of a foreign demand, which has never been 
80 pressing as during the last ten years. It is possible to double our present popula- 
tion without diminishing this high rate of supply. There is more danger at present 
of overproduction and unremnnerative prices than of scarcity. he proportion 
ana agriculture in the West is still too large, and far too large in the South; 
