According to the statistics of the United States Government, a comparison of the last five years reported in this century with the last five years of the old century, shows, by these two five-year averages, that our annual production of wheat has increased from about five hundred million to seven hundred million bushels: that our annual production of corn has increased from two and one-quarter billion to two and three-quarter billion bushels; that our wheat exports have decreased from thirty-seven per cent. to seventeen per cent. of our total production; that our corn exports have decreased from nine per cent. to three per cent. of our total production; and yet the average price of wheat, by the five-year periods, has increased thirty-one per cent., and the average price of corn has increased ninety-one per cent., during the same period.
The latest Year Book of the Department of Agriculture (1908 ) furnishes the average yields of wheat and corn for four successive ten-year periods, from 1866 to 1905. By combining these into two twenty-year periods this record of forty years shows that the average yield of wheat for the United States increased one bushel per acre, while the average yield of corn decreased one and one-half bushels per acre, according to these two twenty-year averages.
If we consider only the statistics for the North-Central states, extending from Ohio to Kansas and from "Egypt" to Canada, the same forty-year record shows the average yield of wheat to have increased one-half bushel per acre, while the average yield of corn decreased two bushels per acre.
Thus, notwithstanding the great areas of rich virgin soils brought under cultivation in the West and Northwest during the last forty years, notwithstanding the abandonment of great areas of wornout lands in the East and Southeast during the same years, notwithstanding the enormous extension of dredge ditching and tile drainage, and, notwithstanding the marked improvement in seed and in the implements of cultivation, the average yield per acre of the two great grain crops of the United States has not even been maintained, the decrease in corn being greater than the increase in wheat, and not only for the entire United States, but also for the great new states of the corn belt and wheat belt.
( Seasonal variations are so great that shorter periods than twenty-year averages cannot be considered trustworthy for yield per acre.)
Meanwhile, the total population of the United States increased from thirty-eight millions in 1870 to seventy-six millions in 1900, or an increase of one hundred per cent. in thirty years; and the only means by which we have been able to feed this increase in population has been by increasing our acreage of cultivated crops and by decreasing our exportation of foodstuffs; and I need not remind you that the limit to our relief is near in both of these directions. But have we decreased our exportation of phosphate? Oh, no. On the contrary, under the soothing influence of the most pleasing and acceptable doctrine that our soil is an indestructible, immutable asset, which cannot be depleted, our exportation of rock phosphate has increased during the years of the present century from six hundred and ninety thousand tons in 1900, to one-million three hundred and thirty thousand tons in 1908, an increase of practically one hundred per cent., in accordance with the published reports of the United States Geological Survey.
But I am writing to you, Mr. Hill, not only to thank you for what you have said and shown in the twenty-eight pages above referred to, but also in part to repay my obligation to you by giving you some correct information, which I am altogether confident you will appreciate; namely, that, while you are a graduate student or past master in your knowledge of the supply and demand of the world's markets, you are just entering the kindergarten class in the study of soil fertility, as witness the following extracts from the one erroneous page of your article.
"Right methods of farming, without which no agricultural country such as this can hope to remain prosperous, or even to escape eventual poverty, are not complicated and are within the reach of the most modest means. They include a study of soils and seeds, so as to adapt the one to the other; a diversification of industry, including the cultivation of different crops and the raising of live stock; a careful rotation of crops, so that the land will not be worn out by successive years of single cropping; intelligent fertilizing by the system of rotation, by cultivating leguminous plants, and, above all, by the economy and use of every particle of fertilizing material from stock barns and yards; a careful selection of grain used for seed; and, first of all perhaps in importance, the substitution of the small farm, thoroughly tilled, for the large farm, with its weeds, its neglected corners, its abused soil, and its thin product. This will make room for the new population whose added product will help to restore our place as an exporter of foodstuffs. Let us set these simple principles of the new method out again in order:
_"First—_The farmer must cultivate no more land than he can till thoroughly. With less labor he will get more results. Official statistics show that the net profit from one crop of twenty bushels of wheat to the acre is as great as that from two of sixteen, after original cost of production has been paid.
_"Second—_There must be rotation of crops. Ten years of single cropping will pretty nearly wear out any but the richest soil. A proper three or fiveyear rotation of crops actually enriches the land.