HOW THE WORLD IS FED 



cereal crop of 5,000,000,000 bushels. 

 Were all of our arable land under culti- 

 vation and producing only according- to 

 our present standard, which is less than 

 half as high as that of western Europe, 

 we could add enough cereals to take care 

 of an additional population the size of 

 that of Europe (see also page 91). 



LITTLE ROOM FOR PESSIMISM 



When one has lived on land, as the 

 writer has done, which, at the end of the 

 Civil War, did not produce more than 

 eight bushels of wheat and twenty bushels 

 of corn to the acre, and has seen this land 

 produce as high as forty-five bushels of 

 wheat and a hundred bushels of corn, it 

 is difficult to take any other than an opti- 

 mistic view of the possibilities of Ameri- 

 can agriculture. 



Not only are there infinite possibilities 

 yet untouched in our own country, but 

 also in most of the other countries of the 

 earth as well. For instance, Russia, that 

 land for which nature has done so much, 

 endowing it with food-producing possi- 

 bilities such as few other countries pos- 

 sess, has a wheat yield of only ten bushels 

 to the acre. 



When the day comes, as come it cer- 

 tainly will, that Russia produces as much 

 per acre as Germany and England, and 

 when the untold millions of acres of un- 

 developed land are opened up and settled, 

 as they are destined to be, alone she can 

 supply the world's present needs in 

 cereals except rice and corn (see pages 

 24 and 25). 



TROPICAL POSSIBILITIES 



Nor is that all. Any one who has trav- 

 eled through the tropics, studying the pro- 

 duction of foodstuffs there at first hand, 

 cannot fail to understand that vast po- 

 tential food sources still lie untouched. 

 The wonderful discoveries of Ross and 

 Reed and their coadjutors, of the meth- 

 ods of preventing malaria and yellow 

 fever, followed by the mastery of the 

 secrets of the bubonic plague and beri- 

 beri, and the application of these lessons 

 in Cuba, at Panama, and elsewhere in 

 the tropical world, have made it possible 

 for civilized man to open up gardens of 

 plenty of which he never before dreamed. 



Untold millions of acres of densest 



jungles are, so far as man is concerned, 

 nothing more than lands of infinite rich- 

 ness wasting their sweetness upon the 

 desert air of unutilized opportunities. 



Not long ago I visited the ruins of 

 Ouirigua, in Guatemala. The United 

 Fruit Company had set apart several hun- 

 dred acres as a reservation for the pro- 

 tection of the ruins. The jungle forest 

 of the reservation, bordering the banana 

 clearings, towered like a green wall a 

 hundred feet high, and the undergrowth 

 was so dense that no man could penetrate 

 it save by cutting his way through with a 

 machete. 



There I saw the contrast between the 

 past and the future of the tropical world. 

 The banana plantations, stretching for 

 miles and miles up and down the Motaga 

 River valley, were producing millions of 

 bunches of bananas, where but a few 

 years before had existed the same sort 

 of jungle as that at Ouirigua. 



NEW PRODUCTS AVAILABLE 



Not only are there vast millions of 

 acres of potentially rich agricultural lands 

 still awaiting development, and not only 

 is it certain that the production per acre 

 of those lands now under cultivation will 

 be vastly increased, but new products are 

 an inevitable prospect of the future. 



When one travels in tropical countries 

 he finds that banana flour makes an excel- 

 lent substitute for wheat flour ; and if the 

 day ever comes when the wheat and the 

 rye and the barley crops do not yield 

 sufficient bread, there are hundreds of 

 millions of acres of potential banana land 

 which will produce many- fold as much 

 banana flour to the acre as we are able to 

 get today of wheat flour from our wheat 

 lands. 



One might go on at length showing the 

 wonderful possibilities of agriculture that 

 lie in the future. Even if there should be 

 no other developments than those which, 

 by experience alone, we are able to fore- 

 cast, there is no question but that the 

 prospect of the world's starvation is to all 

 practical purposes as remote as it was in 

 the days of the pessimistic Malthus. 



But just as the forecasts of Malthus 

 failed to consider the possibilities of the 

 age of agricultural machinery, the age 



