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bulbs, roots, and cuttings in flower-pots, which, on a scale suitable for 

 the local circumstances, could be duplicated at home by individual 

 pupils, by the pupils from one household, and even by groups of pupils 

 -who live contiguous t- each other — it being so arranged that each mem- 

 ber of the combination should have a right to claim the necessary 

 attention to one or more pots as exclusively his or her own, while the 

 lessons to be learned from all the pots would be common to every one. 

 (d) Field demonstrations, in which the objects of interest would be, so 

 to say. infinite in variety, (e) And for the benefit of older children and 

 those who have left school, as well as the more enlightened of their 

 parents, school libraries of usefal books on rural subjects, which every 

 one could not be expected to possess. 







RICE CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES. 



By S. a. Knapp. * 



[Note by F. Y. Coville, Botanist. In the year 1898 the United 

 States used 190,285,315 pounds of imported rice, in addition to the 

 home-grown crop of 116,101,760 pounds. Of the common cereals, 

 barley, maize, oats, rye, and wheat, the United States produced 

 during the same period, in addition to the domestic consumption, 

 an export quantity of 21,205,469,356 pounds. In the case of one 

 cereal, rice, we produce only about half the amount we con- 

 sume. Of all the others we produce an enormous surplus for 

 frxport. This anomalous condition is due to the fact that rice, in addi- 

 tion to its tropical or subtropical character, is a crop grown chiefly on 

 wet lands, where it has hitherto been impossible to use harvesting 

 machinery. The crop must therefore be out with a sickle, and American 

 hand labour has been thrown into competition with the cheap labour of 

 the tropics, a competition that has not proved profitable to the American. 

 Under dry-land cultivation rice is a precarious crop. From all these 

 circumstances rice cultivation in the United States has not attained in 

 past years the full development of a prosperous industry. 



In 1880 a peculiar 'prairie region extending along the coast of 

 south-western Louisiana was opened up by the construction of a rail- 

 road. In 1881 enterprising st^ttlers began the development of a new 

 system of rice culture, by which as now perfected, the elevated and 

 normally or periodically dry prairie lands are flooded by a system of 

 pumps, canals, and levees, and when the rice is about to mature the 

 water is drained ofi, leaving the land dry enough for the use of reaping 

 machines. Under this system the cost of harvesting, and therefore the 

 total cost of production, have been greatly reduced and the industry 

 has undergone a rapid development. In 1896 the depressing ellects of 

 a new difiacuity began to be heavilv felt. The varieties ot rice most 

 productive and otherwise satisfactory from a cultural standpoint under 

 the new system were defective commercially, because the percentage of 



* Bulletin No. 22, U. S. Departmeut of Agriculture, Division of Botany. 



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