38 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW 



business of making buttons or biscuits. If the 

 correspondent who toiled and saved for years 

 to fit himself to go back to the land had been 

 a close observer of present-day conditions, he 

 would have found an explanation of the 

 editor's contempt for his five thousand dollars 

 capital in a single fact gleaned from the last 

 census. In the decade ending in April, 1910, 

 the population of the United States mouths 

 to be fed increased twenty-one per cent; in 

 the same period, land the source of food 

 increased in acreage only 4.8 per cent. That 

 means that every acre nominally in farms was 

 called on to feed more mouths than before. 



Yet the average acre did not materially in- 

 crease in productiveness in those ten years. In 

 spite of the propaganda of intensive farming, 

 which is to make two blades of grass grow 

 where one grew before, the productiveness of 

 our manufacturing plant for food has not 

 varied in efficiency since the beginning. It has 

 followed absolutely the pressure gage imposed 

 by fluctuating weather conditions. To meet 

 the additional demands of hunger, the industry 

 of farming has heretofore increased its floor 

 space, the number of acres under the plow. 

 This is what it attempted to do at the begin- 



