Neither have we been careful to conserve and stimulate the settlement of a truly agricultural population on the land. We have exported the cult of sterility from the old world to the new. We have measured in this new world a field of production, not for the labourers, but for their European mandatories. It was said in the days of the Spanish dominion that America was the “factoria” of the mother country. She has seemingly not yet ceased to be regarded as a “factoria.”
We take pride that we export so much and need so little. We call it a favourable “balance of trade.” We spread abroad pamphlets and graphic charts and dreary columns of ciphers to show how successfully we have gutted the land we live on to fill alien mouths. We display pictures of train loads of labour-saving machinery, glorying in the fact that one man aided by Pittsburg steel and Cardiff coal can fend off twenty families from a thousand acres, and garner the yield for the contentment of fat-handed brokers eating lobsters in a distant city.
Had the matter been understood rightly by the “estanciero” of a generation or two ago, nay, even by this present generation, he would have put a premium on fecundity. His business was to encourage population; but while he drowsed in siesta hour over the newspaper proclaiming the arrival of alien immigration and smiling unctuously at the intelligence, he condemned his own men to celibacy, unwilling to spend the price of five bullocks on a mud hut to cradle the generation on his own land of a race of lusty yeomen. He took pride in the number of calves and lambs born on his estate. It would have beseemed him better to take pride in the number of babies born there.
Such a consummation would be vastly upsetting to Malthusian economists who view with jealousy the peopling of new fields of production. They would have us believe that it is only here by the overflowing of the Nile, and there by the discovery of the New World, that the human race has been saved from famine. If we can no longer send 350,000 tons of meat and five million tons of cereals to the Old World our usefulness has passed away and our mission ended.
Fiddlesticks! Had the Pampas of South America, the pasture lands of Australia, and the wheat fields of Canada remained virgin there would have been ere now thousands of acres in Great Britain under glass and harnessing the solar spectrum and the electric currents of air to manufacture food for the people. Feminists, instead of rending other people’s garments to bewail the departure of their mankind, would be conjuring out of four-inch potsherds fruit rich and rare for the household. If among the social economists of the present generation there is a disposition to revert to the Malthusian creed; in this spacious country, and as far as the vegetative population is concerned, there is no need to raise the voice of alarm. National progress and thrift will be soonest achieved by the increase of the national population; and, without closing the doors to useful alien immigration, the welfare of the community should be dependent rather upon the increase of the family than upon the overflow population from other lands. … Under our present system of agriculture the domestic requirements of the country are sacrificed to foreign demand. We measure our progress by our export trade of raw produce. When we speak of agriculture what we really mean is the production of maize, wheat and linseed for shipment abroad.
It is to this end that so much has been heard of warrants, elevators and other devices to enable the farmer to dispose of his crop. They are in some degree devices for his own security; but they are in a much greater degree devices to secure for the export of cereals a more regular flow from the sources that supply it. The time is no doubt distant when this country shall have a population sufficient to consume the raw produce of its soil; but by turning our eyes constantly to its export trade as the sole source of its production we have not only limited the lines of our agricultural production, but we have neglected complementary lines that would have increased that export trade by maintaining soil values.
The cereal that gives the best return from a large area of our Pampa soil and climate is barley. Being shallow-rooted our indifferent tilth suffices for its seed bed; and being short lived it can be sown late and harvested early, reducing the risks from frost and drought. The “chacarero” who produces 8 fanegas of wheat could produce on averages from the same soil and with no better husbandry 18 fanegas of barley per hectare. In food equivalents that is equal to 280 kilogrammes of pork.
The “chacarero” does not grow barley for the same reason that he neglects or ignores almost every branch of agriculture except wheat, maize and linseed. For the same reason that he neglects rotation, fallow and weeds; vegetables and small fruits; live-stock breeding and feeding; poultry, dairy, and bee-hiving, tree planting; and the greatest of all cultures—home culture. He has no fixity of tenure. There is no other reason.
It is said of the Argentine “chacarero” that he is ignorant and incapable of good husbandry. When he first began, of course, he was ignorant. The gold medallist from an Agricultural College is ignorant when he begins to practise farming. Though the farmer’s craft engages the whole cyclopædia of science, and there is no limit to the knowledge it demands, its practice is essentially one of observation and local experience. To those the “chacarero” comes as well equipped as another. His ignorance is but the reflection of his environment.
It is also said of him that he is greedy, and undertakes a larger area than he can cultivate. Again, his greed is but the reflection of the landowner’s. He is called to the land on terms that exclude all fixity of tenure, maintenance of soil values, small farming, rotation or live-stock values; terms that merely bind him to plough as best he can a given area, to seed it in cereals that will enable his landlord to collect without inconvenience his rent in kind, delivered “dry, sound and bagged” at the foot of the threshing mill; to continue this process for three or more years; and at the end of his term to go to the devil if his unsuccess has not already landed him in that quarter.