The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-11-25
RICE IN HAWAII.
The Industry as Carried on In the Is- lands Compared With That
 of Gulf States.

The IudustPy as Carried on in the Is- lands Compared With That
 of Gulf States.
 z While rice has dwindled to the van ishinE point as a Hawaiian export sta pie within a few years, the rice indus try of the mainland has been advane- ing by leaps and bounds. The Crop Reporter, published by authority of the Secretary of Agriculture, in it's Sep tember issue states that a preliminary report to the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics of the Department of Agri- culture shows the total acreage of rice in the United States this season to be about 643.40 acres, distributed as fol- lows: North Carolina, 1900; South Carolina, 33.300; Georgia, 5000; Lou isiana. 365, 100, and Texas, 2S4020 acres. The rice acreage of the country has increased S3 per cent. within the last five years, and is now four times as large as 1t was fifteen years ago. In 1899 Louisiana and Texas contained 59.9 per cent. of the total rice acreage of the country. Now these States con- tain 93.1 per cent. of the greatly in- creased total.
 Rice cultivation. in the Gulf States Is not the same kind of an industry as
 we see in Hawaii To compare them would be like comparing the great wheat farms of the. United States with the corn-growing industry at the time of Moses, who made it a .misdemeanor to muzzle the OK that threshed out the crop with his hoofs. In Louisiana and Texas modern machinery and methods are used in every. stage of the rice in dustry, from the preparing of the ground to the marketing of the cleaned product. The question has been raised as to whether or not the available areas Cor rfr largo and the lay of the land is suitable, in these islands, to make practicable cul- tivation on a large scale, with ma chinery and methods of irrigation such as are employed on the vast marsh level of the Gulf States. However that problem may be determined, 1t Is to be hoped that the local industry will not utterly pass away. The large domes- tic consumption of rice, as the princi- pal food of thousands of plantation la borers. makes the saving to the Terri tory from raising it's own supply some thing worth an effort to procure. Even with the ancient system in vogue here, where the planters are Orientals. the absence of all winter conditions and the unequaled productiveness of the soil. together with the transportation item. ought to count for smuch in meeting competition of mainland rice. A Der of the Hawaiian Forester and Agri- culturist. on the authority of the United States Census. both the yield and the average value of an acre of rice in Ha- wall were out of sight higher four years ago than they were in the South ern States The only cause that we have heard stated for the depression
 in the Hawaiian rice industry is scarcity of labor. If there are no oth- CT causes, then. under the exclusion act and so long as the Chinese planters are dependent on. or look only to. their own countrymen for labor in the rice fields. the condition would seem to be irremediable. It would probably be Idle, during a strong sugar market. to propose the Interpretation of American enterprise and capital for creating a new rice industry, supposlng, what has been shown to be questioned, that la bor-saving devices. could here be sue cessfully applied.