OTHER AIDS TO FARMING 179 



products in the past it has been because she is a 

 large country possessed of a varied climate and 

 containing a vast amount of new soils stored with 

 enough fertility to last for a number of years. 

 She has never faced a famine as the countries of 

 the old world face them almost yearly. But what 

 will happen when our lands have all been brought 

 into cultivation, and our older lands have been 

 so neglected that they will lose their crop produc- 

 ing power? It would be but repeating history, 

 for the older nations of the world were at one time 

 in their history possessed of an abundance of fer- 

 tile soils and famine was unknown to them. Even 

 one crop failure in this land of ours would bring 

 us face to face with a famine, because we have no 

 Joseph's Egyptian filled storehouses dotting our 

 land. 



It was recently promulgated by our agriculture 

 department that only a small per cent, of our till- 

 able lands were under cultivation. But these 

 statistics were misleading because a large amount 

 of our unoccupied lands can not be successfully 

 tilled, because rainfall is not sufficient upon them 

 for needs of the growing crops, and the problem 

 of irrigating them is impracticable because a suffi- 

 cient amount of water could not be secured for 

 irrigation projects. 



But we have not yet reached the greatest age of 

 perfected farm machinery. The time is right at 

 hand when the small farm tractor, cheap and sub- 

 stantial, will do the plowing and preliminary till- 

 age before seed planting, and the dawn of cultivat- 

 ing implements moved with the motive power of 

 electricity made upon the farms is about to ilium- 



