November, 1909.] 



454 



Miscellaneous^ 



of Secretary Wilson, of the Department 

 of Agriculture, is assured to us and we 

 believe that good results will quickly 

 follow. Among the earlier work done 

 through the efforts of Mr. Wilson was 

 the introduction into this country of 

 some hardy varieties of rice, including 

 what we now familiarly call Japan rice. 

 This rice, however, does not seem to be 

 as much in favour as was hoped for it 

 some years back. It seemed to ripen 

 more slowly and to reach the harvesting 

 season at a period when there are severe 

 storms in this State, and standing rice 

 would be liable to storm injury. The 

 rice grains were short and round and 

 looked more like barley than the hand- 

 some, long grains of our present so called 

 Honduras rice. There remains, however, 

 very many problems to be solved in the 

 rice industry just as there remain very 

 many in the cane industry, but such 

 solutions are reached by gradual advance 

 movements and not at one jump as many 

 would suppose. 



We have the old adage that experience 

 is a dear teacher and that fools will 

 learn in no other. It is a pity for the 

 agriculturist of to-day to have to commit 

 every error of his ancestors before he 

 shall learn how to reach success, and 

 financial conditions are so changed to-day 

 that those who are sufficiently persistent 

 in their personal conclusions as to 

 exclude from consideration the experi- 

 ence of others are quite apt to fail, as 

 now practically every industry, agri- 

 cultural, manufacturing, mercantile or 

 otherwise, is carried on at less margins 

 than formerly, and errors made in 

 management have more serious results 

 now than ever before. 



Agricultural life for years has been 

 thought to be sufficiently remunerative 

 to justify men of ability continuing in 

 it. In the great States of the West and 

 in fact everywhere in the Federal 

 union we can now find men of great 

 ability in agriculture, who treat their 

 business as an exact science and have 

 solved the problem as to how to make 

 agricultural industry remunerative. The 

 statement made last year that in 

 Minnesota the farmers were the chief 

 buyers of automobiles is said to have 

 been an accurate one, and it shows the 

 trend of modern agriculture. 



So many persons have left the country 

 and gone to the great cities that poverty 

 seems to be transporting itself to the 

 cities, and those who are left in the 

 country are now beginning to reap their 

 reward in the high prices that are pre- 

 vailing generally for the products of the 

 soil. While sugar does seem an excep- 

 tion to this rule, yet rice and corn, the 



great cereal crops, are both bringing 

 remunerative prices, and the high 

 prices prevailing in the markets for 

 practically every agricultural product 

 must necessarily have their beneficial 

 effect upon the welfare of the producer. 



To this wonderful advancement in 

 agriculture and to this softening of the 

 rough edges of agricultural life by 

 promoting in every direction the use of 

 mechanical devices, driven by animal, 

 steam or gasoline power, nothing has 

 contributed more than the work of the 

 experiment stations throughout the 

 United States. The whole force con- 

 stitutes practically an army of well 

 educated men, thoroughly informed in 

 the specialties in which they are engaged, 

 and all interested directly and com- 

 petitively by their own personal 

 ambitions in bringing about the very 

 best results that are possible. Such 

 work as this has developed the manu- 

 facturing, commercial, transportation 

 and banking interests of the country, as 

 well as the various phases of so-called 

 professional lite. In other words, agri- 

 culture has now come to take con- 

 spicuous place among the industries of 

 the country, not because it employs so 

 many persons, but because those engaged 

 in it are far better educated than such 

 persons were a few decades ago and 

 agriculture is coming to be a profession, 

 as much as chemistry, medicine or law. 



Not many years ago two-thirds of the 

 people of the United States were engaged 

 in agriculture. The Civil War with- 

 drew so many hundreds of thousands 

 of persons from agriculture that those 

 remaining learned how to carry on agri- 

 cultural work with greatly reduced 

 forces. The attractions of city life have 

 drawn hundreds of thousands from the 

 pursuits of their youth, and now Mr. 

 James J, Hill, the famous railroad man 

 of the North-west, says that against two- 

 thirds of the people earning their living 

 directly from the land some years back, 

 now not over one-third are engaged in 

 so doing, and this one-third of the much 

 abused class of agriculturists, abused 

 years ago because of their lack of know- 

 ledge, are now abused because of the 

 so-called exorbitant prices that they are 

 getting for their staple crops off the 

 land, estimated by the Secretary of 

 Agriculture to amount to over eight 

 thousand millions of dollars for this 

 year. With wheat at if I "25 a bushel and 

 corn at about 80 cents, we can estimate 

 what the proceeds would be of our 

 expected crop of over three thousand 

 millions of bushels of corn, 660 millions 

 of bushels of wheat, and 11£ millions 

 bales of cotton. Corn is king and wheat 

 end cotton come next, 



