"If we want, however, to know, what agriculture can be and what 

 can be grown on a given amount of soil, we must apply for information 

 to the market-gardening culture in the neighborhoods of Paris, Amiens 

 and other large cities in France and in Holland. There we shall learn 

 that each hundred acres, under proper cultivation, yield food, not for 

 forty human beings, as they do on our best farms, but for 200 and 300 

 persons; not for 60 milch cows, as they do in the Island of Jersey, but for 

 200 cows and more if necessary. They (the gardeners) have created a 

 totally new agriculture. They smile when we boast about the rotation 

 system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, 

 or four crops every three years, because their ambition is to have six and 

 nine crops from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. 

 They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they 

 make the soils themselves. They aim at cropping not five or six tons of 

 grass on the acre, as we do, but fifty to one hundred tons of various 

 vegetables on the same space; not $25 worth of hay, but $500 worth of 

 vegetables of the plainest description, cabbage and carrots. That is 

 where agriculture is going now." 



Prince Kropotkin adds: "In the hands of men, there are 

 no unfertile soils. The most fertile soils are not in the prairies 

 of America, nor in the Russian steppes; they are in the peat- 

 bogs of Ireland, on the sand-downs of the northern seacoast, 

 on the craggy mountains of the Rhine, where they have been 

 made by man's hands." 



A French scientist once longed for two degrees less of 

 latitude, that, among other things, he could have the luxuries 

 of the season. The market gardener in the neighborhood of 

 Paris has practically eliminated the matter of climate. In 

 fact, he defies climate. By his wall culture, glass houses, cold 

 frames, etc., he has made a rich southern garden from which 

 he supplies the city of Paris "with mountains of grapes and 

 fruit in any season, and in spring he inundates and perfumes 

 it with flowers" — in addition to an abundance of plain vege- 

 tables. In no city are the products of the garden and green- 

 house cheaper or better. 



What We Are Doing at Home 



But we need not go to France or Holland to find intensive 

 farming. Within a few miles of our largest cities we are, in a 

 measure, duplicating the results about Paris — perhaps not so 

 intensively, because market conditions do not require it, but 

 certainly quite as scientifically and profitably. We have our 

 intensive farmers who are not satisfied with a return of $100 



31 



Five 



Hundred 

 Dollars 

 per Acre 



Culture 

 Defies 

 Climate 



