TRIUMPHS OF SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE
I. Its Struggle with Rural Conservatism.
Modern Efficiency not Confined to Cities
Efficiency is everywhere demanded by the spirit of our times. We are living in an age that does things. Whatever the difficulties, it somehow gets things done. It brings to pass even the seemingly impossible. Are there mountains in the way? It goes over, under, or through.—There are no mountains! Is there an isthmus, preventing the union of great seas and blocking commerce? It erases the isthmus from the world’s map.—There is no isthmus! The masterful time-spirit has little patience with puttering inefficiency. It expects every man to pull his weight, to earn his keep, to do his own task, and not to whimper.
Our cities are hives of efficiency, cruel efficiency often. With new pace-makers every year, the wheels of industry speed ever faster, raising the percentage of effectiveness, per dollar of capital and per capita employed. Hundreds at the wheels, with scant nerves, fail to keep the pace; and the race goes by them. But the pace keeps up. Other workmen grow more deft and skillful. The product is both cheapened and perfected. The plant becomes more profitable, under fine executive efficiency. The junk-heap grows apace: Out goes every obsolete half-success. In comes every new machine which reduces friction, doubles results, halves the cost of maintenance, and swells dividends. Surely efficiency is the modern shibboleth.
Here is the new Tungsten electric lamp, which uses half the current, at low voltage, but doubles the light; the very dazzling symbol of efficiency. How it antiquates the best Edison lamp of yesterday! Yet the Tungsten becomes old-fashioned in a year. It is too fragile and is speedily displaced by the improved Mazda.
But city life has no monopoly on efficiency. In fact we do not find in the mills or factories the best illustrations of modern effectiveness. We have to go back to the soil. Agriculture has become the newest of the arts, by the grace of modern science. To make two blades of grass grow where one grew before is too easy now. Multiplying by two is small boys’ play. Burbank has out-Edisoned Edison! He and other experimenters in the scientific breeding of plants and animals have increased the efficiency of every live farmer in the land, and have added perhaps a billion dollars a year to the nation’s wealth.
They have not yet crossed the bee and the firefly, as some one has suggested, to produce an illuminated bee that could work at night by his own light. Nor have they produced woven-wire fences by crossing the spider and the wire-worm! Not yet; but they have done better. By skillful cross-breeding, they have raised the efficiency of the sugar beet from 7% to 15% sugar. They have produced hardy, seedless oranges, plums, apples, and strawberry plants which will stand the climate of the frozen north. They have developed fine, long-stapled cotton, high-yielding cereal grains, and mammoth carnations and chrysanthemums. They have produced the wonderberry, the Wealthy Apple and the Burbank Potato. They have developed flax with 25% more seed. And the “Minnesota Number Thirteen Corn,” so hardy and sure, has carried the cornbelt in three great states fully fifty miles further to the north, with its magnificent wake of golden profits. No wonder America feeds the world. Such is our splendid Yankee genius for efficiency. It is the master-spirit, the ruling genius of our age; and it shows itself best on our fields and prairies. Other nations compete fairly well with our manufactures. They outstrip us in commerce. But they are hopelessly behind our American agriculture. The farm products of this country amounted in the year 1910 to almost nine billion dollars. The corn crop alone was worth a billion and a half; enough to cancel the entire interest-bearing debt of the United States, buy all of the gold and silver mined in all the countries of the earth in 1909, and still leave the farmers pocket-money.[21]
The Natural Conservatism of Farmers
In all fairness it must be said, the modern gospel of progressiveness has not been everywhere accepted, far from it. Plenty of farmers, doubtless the majority, are still following the old traditions. Country folks as a rule are conservative. They like the old ways and are suspicious of “new-fangled notions.” Director Bailey of Cornell enjoys telling the comment he overheard one day from a farmer of this sort. It was after he had been speaking at a rural life conference, doubtless proposing various plans for better farming, which differed from the honored superstitions of the neighborhood. A stolid native was overheard saying to his neighbor, “John, let them blow! They can’t hurt me none.” He prided himself on being immune to all appeals at such a rural life revival.