6 THREE ACRES AND LIBERTY 



In addition, the farms have held out such poor prospects 

 of fortune that the smarter and more enterprising boys and 

 girls have left them for the towns, leaving behind the duller 

 and more conservative to the mercy of the railroads and 

 other monopolies. What wonder, then, that the overworked 

 and struggling farmer finds little chance to study, or to in- 

 vestigate and invest in fertilizers or even in modern methods 

 of agriculture. 



No wonder farming does not pay if a "farmer" means a 

 stupid man with neither training for, nor knowledge of, his 

 business. Those who have the knowledge seldom have the 

 experience and those who have the experience seldom have 

 the knowledge. 



The bonanza farms of the West are other samples of great 

 areas of the most productive land in the United States being 

 used most unscientifically. By the methods used, the land 

 produces less per acre than land in the East which is not so 

 good. Accordingly, we find that the bonanza farm plan, 

 where great areas of wheat are worked by machines with 

 labor employed only in the seed time and harvest, is rapidly 

 breaking up. As the land becomes valuable and is taxed, 

 such wasteful, wholesale methods do not pay as well as it 

 pays to rent or sell the land to farmers, who each for them- 

 selves attend to details of the business. Consequently, most 

 of those farms are being sold off. The whole amount of 

 wheat ever raised on them, however, is small compared to the 

 rice, millet, and wheat raised in China, India, and Russia, and 

 is insignificant compared to the amount of produce grown on 

 the myriad little farm plots. 1 



1 A comparison of productions as taken from the 12th and 13th 

 United States Censuses in the bonanza farm states shows that the 

 yield of wheat was 



