igoy ] Garden, Field, and Forest of the Nation. 53 
Orange County, which may be reckoned a rural district, 
does not begin to make food enough to maintain its 
inhabitants through the year, and the inhabitants of our 
adjoining county of Durham would starve in less than a 
fortnight if they had to depend on the food product of the 
county for support. When some of us in this hall came to 
college the village of Durham could claim no other distinction 
than that of being the railway station from which students 
drove to Chapel Hill. Today it is a city of more than 20,000 
inhabitants, drawing its population from all parts of the 
world, and dependent upon distant fields for its support. 
And not one of our large cities, Wilmington, Charlotte, 
Asheville, Greensboro, or Raleigh, could depend on its own 
county, or even upon the surplus of a score of adjoining coun- 
ties, for its food. 
Notwithstanding the several years of unprecedented crops 
j that we have had, amounting almost to seven years of plenty, 
we are practically face to face with a famine. The wheat 
lands of our own Northwest have been practically exhausted of 
their lime, as an acre of wheat will use up ten pounds of lime 
in coming to maturity; and this loss, added to the damage 
done the soil by the poisons excreted by the roots of the 
wheat, has caused our farmers of the great plains to seek 
new fields in the Canadian West. Already the natural pas- 
turage of our semi-arid regions has been practically exhausted, 
and neither cattle-raising nor sheep-raising is profitable, 
where within two decades vast fortunes have been made in 
these industries. Those of you who paid your month’s 
butcher’s bills on the first of May were doubtless led by 
their unusual size to investigate causes, and learned that for 
the first time in the history of the Chicago and Kansas City 
packing houses they have not been able to fill their cold 
storage. The demand of the country for fresh meat has 
consumed the entire output of these houses during their busy 
season. And this state of things has c'ome about after three 
years of abundant crops, during which time the packing 
