The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-12-25

consuming power OF Ine people oi Che
United States. There must be foreign
market for considerable part OF our prod
nee, or no market at all for it. Therefore
competition with the rest of the world can
not be altogether avoided by erecting
Chinese wall about our own country. The
American farmer must compete abroad,
if not at home, with the entire agricul-
tural world. There is no escaping such
competition.
In what plight is our American farmer
to meet the competition above outlined as
imminent if not inevitable? From ocean
to ocean and from lakes to gulf he has al
ready despoiled the soil ofits virginity. Its
forests have been denuded and the streams
are drying up. Floods follow droughts and
droughts freshets for want Of wooded areas
to retard evaporation and conserve the
waters until they are needed. Irrigation
is IN it's infancy and a law inconsistent
with it is supreme in our land. Ranges
have been overstocked and grasses eaten
ont until the American farmer is no longer
able to rear young stock to fattenlng
age. and our National Secretary of Agricul-
ture recommends the abolition of the tar
1ff on importations of stock cattle in order
that American farmers may have cattle to
iced. More than $1,000 Mexican cattle
were imported during the first half of this
year. In fine, the generation which is
passing has loaded posterity with bonded
debt, skinned their heritage of its first fer
tility and is making its ignoble exit into
oblivion amid bowls of calamity.
In the now historic language of our
President, it is a condition and not a
theory which confronts the agricultural
interests of America. There is no es-
Gaping the Issue. The law of adaptation
to condition will admit of no excuses. 1t
is adapt or die; and how to adapt, l take
it, is the real theme of this agricultural
symposium.
With a rich soil, genial climate and
a limitless range for predatory herds ANY
fool can farm" but confne a man to a
SKINNED patch of earth and his cattle to
within their masters landmarks, and
man has got to be man to make living
such as every American deems his due.
The close OF this century will, almost
without exception, see this the status of
agricultural America, and the sons OF
American soil who do not make them
selves equal to the exigency will, with
such notifications as purer Christianity
may impose, be to American landlords
what the thralls were to the Saxons and
the HeIots were to the Greeks. The
victory in the stress of agricultural life
will fall to him who can produce the
most and the best at the lowest cost, and,
as the Secretary of Agriculture has aptly
remarked, 1.-The issue will depend upon
mental rather than manual effort"
Of vrh in
the United States for the ten years preced-
ing 1880 was L bushels, and such yield
at present prizes would barely return the
cost of production. But at Tulare expert
mental station, with grounds plowed and
cross plowed and pulverize0 almost to
dust, seed selected and sowed in drills six
inches apart and. although the grain was
not irrigated and the rainfall did not ex-
coed II inches for the entire year, the yield
OF different varieties of wheat ranged all
the way from 90 to So bushels to the acre,
or more properly speaking, at that rate for
the parcels sowed. At one of the stations
in Wyoming three years OF successive ex-
periments have raised the average yield of
wheat from 10 bushels common to the
State, to 329 bushels at the stations.
The Agricultural Department records
show that the average yield of Indian corn
in the United States for the past twenty
five years does not exceed twenty-five
bushels to the acre. and vet at q station in
old and well-worn Pennsylvania by plant
ing good kernels six inches apart one way
and forty-two inches the other, yield of
sixty-nine bushels to the acre was OBJ
tanned, and 1 have myself seen a Kansas
acre that was carefully seeded, thoroughly
prepared and cultivated, yield lis BUSH
els of good corn in the ear when many adj
jacent fields were filled with nubbins.
The crying need of the stock industry is
forage. With more than half the area of our
country unfit for any purpose other than
growth of forest or forage, we are already
under the necessity of importing stock cat
tie because we have not forage sufficient to
enable our farmers to rear their own young
stock to feeding age.
If, in what has preceded, the object |
had in view has been attained, I have
shown, not without some emphasis, the
absolute necessity for the large and con-
slant employment of scientific experiment
IN agriculture. In no department of
human affairs is intelligent and scientific
method more likely to prove satisfactory
in results than in tilling the soil. Nature is
10th to adapt herself to uncongenial con-
ditions and she has no mpassion for even
innocent ignorance of what her conditions
are. A few years ago hundreds of acres of
Tulare lands, lily adapted to the purpose,
were set to vines with the incidental con-
sequence that / am kept warm as / write
this by the burning of grape-roots in my
crate. Hundreds of thousands of dollars
were wasted and hundreds of people were
Impoverished primarily because they did
not know what manner of soil the raisin
grape required, and this is only one of
thousand instances of the pitiful conse-
quences OF a lack of accurate knowledge of
natures laws.
But how is the farmer to learn things
which are needful to know? This is the
crux of the question. Fairs devoted to
horseracing will not teach him, and not
all farmers sons can receive instruction at
agricultural colleges when there is only
one to State. Industrial instruction, in
lieu of what is familiarly called higher ed
ucation, should, so it seems to me, form a
part OF or an adjunct TO common school
education; but public sentiment is not