28 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW 



and anxious to do business at the old stand. 

 He was willing to wipe the slate clean, in 

 consideration of the fact that there is no place 

 like home, after all. When he heard Jere- 

 miah's story, the willow-bank farmer had the 

 same notions as Farmer Jones ; but he assumed 

 a little more sympathy for Jeremiah. 



"Why don't you go on farther west, where 

 you can get land for fifty or one hundred dol- 

 lars an acre?" he asked. 



"What good would that do me?" asked 

 Jeremiah. "What I would save in interest 

 on capital, I would lose in freight getting my 

 corn to market. It would be all the same in 

 the long run." 



And he was right. Corn in Kansas is 

 worth about three dollars an acre less than 

 corn in Iowa. 



Something is wrong. 



You will probably say at this point that the 

 remedy is obvious. Let Jeremiah put on more 

 steam. He is running his plant at one-third 

 pressure, you say. The American farmer is 

 growing only twenty-seven bushels of corn to 

 the acre. Why, in 1910, a school-boy, Jerry 

 Moore, harvested two hundred and twenty- 

 seven and two-thirds bushels of corn on a 



