LEADING FEATURES OF THE WHEAT INDUSTRY 211 
these ‘‘exploiters’’ of the soil will be found. The United 
States has experienced the effects of such predatory 
cultivation. Canada and the Argentine are experiencing 
it to-day. New Zealand, too, has tasted the ‘‘bitters’’ 
and ‘‘sweets’’ of extensive cropping, but the rapid and 
serious fall in agricultural products in the early ‘‘nine- 
ties,’’ the stimulus given to pastoral interests by the 
development of the frozen meat industry at the same 
time, and the dawn of more enlightened methods of 
farming came in time to counteract the effects of such 
predatory cultivation. 
The result of this movement towards far-seeing and 
beneficial methods of cropping the soil can best be seen 
in the increased yield of wheat per acre during the past 
twenty years. This phenomenon of increasing yield is 
the result of two causes, the exact influence of each of 
which it is difficult to measure. The decrease in the area 
of production, by causing the margin to recede, has 
exerted considerable influence in this direction, but even 
so, the increase in yield has been so great, no less than 
10 bushels per acre since 1893, that it is obvious there 
has been some other influence operating. This factor 
is summed up in the greatly improved methods of culti- 
vation of the last two decades, notably in the case of 
Oanterbury, where the area in acres has been reduced 
relatively less than in Otago. But Canterbury shows 
an absolute rise in yield, almost twice as great as the 
increase in yield for Otago, and for the past six years 
has shown a higher yield per acre than Otago, despite 
the fact that the latter province has a differential 
advantage from the point of view of soil fertility. 
These observations then lead to the conclusion that 
farming methods have greatly improved of recent years, 
and it is unquestionable that New Zealand farming 
methods are relatively superior to those of any other 
new country, though they are undoubtedly surpassed 
