The evening times. [volume] (Grand Forks, N.D.) 1906-1914, 1911-09-26
SCIENTIFIC FARMING
+ Is the Only Solution Of the High
y Cost Of Living

NVSO VI 1flvlllH
X Il 4 4 X 4 X i 4 * X X X i X
Declaring that many farmers Of the
present day have more faith in moon
signs than in agricultural colleges and
experiment stations; more faith in or
binary politicians than in college
professors and scientists. more faith
In yellow journals than in the best
agricultural papers, and that the nine
teenth century farmer was no farmer
at all. but a rObber of the soil, Henry
Wallace, president of the third nation
al conservation congress In session in
Kansas City. delivered an address be-
fore that body yesterday, strongly
urging scientific farming as the only
means by which the cost of living can
be reduced. In part MIR. Wallace
said:
ut will be my object in this ad-
dress not to discuss any phase of the
conservation movement ~eXhaustively,
but to outline briefly two drifts of
population: The drift from the farm
to the city, and the drift from the city
toward the land and the work Of this
congress as related thereto.
Even before the daily press had
OSSuA4 AO NAuSou0 OSIh Z IC 1dl1Ns
the movement toward the land had al
ready begun.
"The land hunger is not peculiar to
any class Of people nor to any state.
The merchant, the banker, the rail-
road official Of New York and Boston,
each longs for a farm, possibly only
as q summer home, but is willing to
pay for it in investment, in improve
ments and cost Of management,
than it is worth in dollars or ever
will be. He, too. is bitten with land
hunger. Many small business men Of
our cities, who cannot hope to secure
a farm and live on it, invest greedily
in acreage in the suburbs. The work.
man in the factory aims to secure two
or three acres on which he a build
himself a home.
THE growth Of large cities has ceas-
ed to be in the business or even in
the old residence sections, and is en-
tirely in the suburbs. The same holds
true abroad. II men cannot have
country life in the. country, they are
constantly aiming to get as much as
possible of the country in the city?
While the steam railroads tend to con
centrate population, as they have from
the beginning. the trolley lines tend to
lure the people back toward the coun-
try.
Latent in the heart of nearly every
man, be he man of business, clerk or
other employe, or laboring with his
hands, there is a yearning desire to
have a piece of land to call his own.
alongside Of this movement back
toward if not always to the farm, the
counter movement from the farm to
the town, which has been going on for
fifty years, continues with increasing
and accelerated force. Farmers all
over the older west move in great
numbers or retire to the country towns
and Notwithstanding all this constant
influx of population from the farms
these towns, Is the late census re-
veals, have barely held their own and
often have lost in population, the nat
ural increase of the towns themselves
pouring into the larger towns and
cities, in which the majority live with
less comfort than the farmers who re-
main on the farms. Vast numbers of
boys and girls fall a prey to alluring
vices of the city, and many of them
eventually take their places with the
down and out" Comparatively few
succeed and become well-to-do. The
children of these few become wealthy;
their grandchildren usually spend
gaily the fortunes they earned;
and naturally the family dies out, at
least 10 far as force and power is con
cerned, in another generation or at
most two or three. The city uses up
men and families as it uses up horses.
And this is true not only in this but
in the older countries as we'll. All
Ireland, for example. except Dublin
and Belfast has lost n0nlllafi0n in tho