308 THE FARMER OF TO-MORROW 



that one laborer takes care of forty acres of 

 land. 



How much food will an acre produce? We 

 have no means of measuring this except by 

 examining the most crowded acres of the 

 world. Professor F. H. King relates an in- 

 stance he encountered in China, by no means 

 unusual in that country, of a plot of 2% acres 

 supporting a farmer and his family of twelve, 

 with one donkey, one cow, and two pigs. 

 This means a density of 3,072 human beings, 

 256 donkeys, 256 cattle, and 512 swine to the 

 square mile. Japan maintained a population 

 of 47,000,000 in 1907 on the food produced 

 by 20,000 square miles of cultivated land, or 

 at the rate of three people to the acre and 

 2,349 to the square mile. Draw a line, says 

 Professor King, from Chicago to the Gulf 

 and another to the western boundary of 

 Kansas and complete the rectangle thus 

 formed and we have the area of cultivated 

 land from which the 500,000,000 of China, 

 Japan and Corea get their food. 



Viewed in the light of these comparisons, 

 the exhaustion of the resources of our soil is 

 remote indeed. 



THE END. 



