The Romance of the Reaper

by Herbert Newton Casson

Very little has been written about this stupendous prosperity of American farmers. Why? Because it is so recent. The Era of Big Profits began barely ten years ago. There was a time when the blue-ribbon New Farmer was the man who grew wheat in the Red River Valley. He was the aristocrat of the West. His year’s work was no more than a few weeks of ploughing and sowing, and a few days of harvesting. Even this was done easily, sitting on the seat of a machine and driving a team of splendid horses. After harvest, he cashed in, carried a big cheque to the bank, and settled down for a long loaf or a trip to the old homestead in the East.

But it was the bad year of 1893 that first put the farmers, the country over, on the road to affluence. Up to that time it was their usual policy to depend upon a single crop. One farmer planted nothing but wheat; another planted nothing but corn; a third nothing but cotton; and so on. But in 1893 the prices of wheat, corn, and cotton fell so low that the farmers’ profits were wiped out. This disaster set the farmers thinking; and in four years they had changed over to the new policy of Diversified Farming.

Instead of putting all their work upon one crop, they planted from three to a dozen different crops each year. They manufactured their corn into cattle. They gave the soil a square deal in the matter of fertilisation. They learned to plant better seed and to pay attention to the Weather Bureau. They studied the market reports. And, best of all, they swung over from muscle to machinery, until to-day the value of the machinery on American farms is fully a thousand millions.

All this amazing progress that I have been describing is by no means the best that the New Farmer will do. It is merely what he has done by the aid of machinery. What he will do by the aid of Science remains to be seen.

Scientific agriculture is young. It has had to wait until machinery prepared the way, by giving the farmers time to think, and money to spend. The first scientist who took notice of farming was the Frenchman, Lavoisier. He found out the composition of water in 1783, and was in the midst of many discoveries, when a Paris mob hustled him to the guillotine. The famous Liebig next appeared and founded the first agricultural experiment station. Then came Berthelot—the father of synthetic chemistry, with his sensational announcement—“The soil is alive.”

To-day the New Farmer finds himself touched by Science on all sides. He knows that there are more living things in one pinch of rich soil than there are people on the whole globe. He knows that he can take half a dozen handfuls of earth from different parts of his farm, mix them together, send one thimbleful to a chemist, and find out exactly the kind of crop that will give him the best harvest. And more, now that science has given him a peep into Nature’s factory, he can even feel a sense of kinship between himself and his acres, because he knows that the same elements that redden his blood are painting the green hues on his fields and forests.

There are now fifteen thousand New Farmers who have graduated from agricultural colleges; and since the late Professor W. C. Atwater opened the first American experiment station in 1875, fifty others have sprung into vigorous life. There is also at Washington an Agricultural Department which has become the greatest aggregation of farm-scientists in the world. To maintain this Department Uncle Sam pays grudgingly eleven millions a year. He pays much more than this to give food and blankets to a horde of lazy Indians, or for the building of two or three warships. But it is at least more than is being spent on the New Farmer in any other country.

Step by step farming is becoming a sure and scientific profession. The risks and uncertainties that formerly tossed the farmer back and forth, between hope and despair, are being mastered. The Weather Bureau, which sent half a million warnings last year to the farmers, has already become so skilful that six-sevenths of its predictions come true. In Kansas, wheat-growing has become so sure that there has been no failure for thirteen years. And in the vast South-West, the trick of irrigation is changing the man-killing desert into a Farmers’ paradise, where there is nothing so punctual as the crops.

Already gasolene engines are in use among the New Farmers. The International Harvester Company made twenty-five thousand of them last year at Milwaukee, without supplying the demand. These engines, in the near future, will be operated with alcohol, which the farmers can distil from potatoes at a cost of ten cents a gallon. This is no dream, as there are now six thousand alcohol engines in use on the farms of Germany alone.

When this Age of Alcohol arrives, the making of the New Farmer will be very nearly complete. He will then grow his own power, and know how to harness for his own use the omnipotence of the soil.