The reader's guide to the Encyclopaedia Britannica

by Inc. Encyclopaedia Britannica

SEE ALSO CHAPTER II, FOR STOCK-RAISERS, CHAPTER III, FOR DAIRY FARMERS

Every farmer in the United States knows that farming is to-day an industry which calls for study of the world’s agricultural products, processes, and markets as well as for scientific knowledge of soils, crops, and animals. Fifty years ago the farmer sold for consumption in his immediate neighborhood the small surplus of his crops that was not needed for his own household and live stock. To-day he competes, in all the world’s great markets, with all the world’s farmers, and is the chief among American exporters. The Russian wheat fields and the Argentine cattle ranches are really nearer to him than a farm in the next township was to his grandfather. He lives better, does more for his children and pays higher wages than do farmers in other parts of the world, and yet he can successfully compete with them, because, as the article on Agriculture in the Encyclopædia Britannica says, in speaking of the United States, “there is no other considerable country where as much mental activity and alertness has been applied to the cultivation of the soil as to trade and manufactures.” American farmers “have been the same kind of men, out of precisely the same houses, generally with the same training, as those who filled the learned professions or who were engaged in manufacturing or commercial pursuits”; and their competitors abroad have been, for the most part, ignorant peasants. The course of reading indicated here is designed for wide-awake farmers who intend to be large farmers—by whom the latest information and the broadest outlook are recognized as essential to their calling. If you think the articles named here cover a great deal of ground, remember that the Massachusetts Agricultural College provides no less than sixty-four distinct courses of instruction, and that the subjects included in all the sixty-four are treated in the Britannica.

GETTING “GROUNDWORK” KNOWLEDGE

You may think, as you look at the titles of articles mentioned in these pages, that there are some which you need not read because you have already read bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture or of your State Experiment Station. These official publications are most valuable, but naturally, they do not attempt to cover the whole range of agricultural subjects as the Britannica does—they are not intended for that purpose. Their arrangement and the way in which they are issued shows that they are designed to meet only certain special needs, not to give a general view of all the branches of farming. One subject may for example be discussed in three different bulletins, published in three different years, and the first may be out of print before the third appears. In the Britannica you get information that forms the very foundation of a thorough knowledge of farming and that also extends over the widest field. Of course it would be absurd to say that merely reading these articles will make any man a successful farmer as to say that a medical student who works hard at his books will always develop the tact and the sound judgment that a doctor needs. But unless the medical student has studied those text books he will never make a successful doctor; and similarly the information in the Britannica will give the farmer new advantages, no matter how much practical experience and special training he has had.

Scope of the Articles

There are in the Encyclopædia Britannica 1,186 articles dealing with animal and vegetable life; and among the 11,341 geographical articles a great many give important information about the production, distribution and consumption of farm products. Those upon continents, countries, states and provinces describe the local crops and any local methods of farming that are of special interest. There are some 600 articles on individual plants, of which a list will be found on pp. 889 and 890 of Vol. 29 (the index volume). If any one of these thousands of articles were not in the Britannica, it would not be quite so valuable as it is to you, for you may, any day, want to find out about any plant that grows, or about farming in any part of the world. A professor in an agricultural college would of course be glad to study the whole series. But in this Course of Reading only the articles which are of most immediate use to all practical farmers are mentioned, and the contents of each of these is described, so that you can omit any article that goes into details which you think you do not want. If you do skip any of them, it will, however, be a good plan to mark their titles in this list, for you may like to come back to them later when you realize how practical and understandable all the Britannica articles are—even those with dullsounding names.

Of course you will begin by reading the article Agriculture (Vol. 1, p. 338), by Dr. Fream and Roland Truslove, which is the key to the whole subject. And remember that this chapter of the Readers’ Guide mentions only those subjects that are treated more fully in other parts of the Britannica than in that article, so that the chapter does not attempt to tell the whole story.

Soil and Subsoil

The first thing a farmer has to deal with is the ground from which his crops are to come. The whole surface of the earth was originally hard rock. The article on Petrology, the science of rocks (Vol. 21, p. 323), by J. S. Flett, and the second part (Vol. 11, p. 659) of the article Geology, by Sir Archibald Geikie, deal with the “weathering” of rock, which has in great part broken it down into the small particles of stone that, mixed with decayed roots and plants, form the soil or subsoil. It may seem that it is going very far back into the origin of things for a farmer to read about the sources from which soil comes, but the nature of the mineral substances in it has a great deal to do with its power to nourish plants, and you cannot know too much about the material on which your principal work is done. The article which should next be read, Soil (Vol. 25, p. 345), continues the story of these particles of rock and shows how sand and clay must be combined with decaying vegetable or animal matter in order to make the best soil. This mixture is in turn “weathered” by air, heat, frost, and moisture; and not only the size of the grains in which it lies, but also their shape—which makes them pack more or less tightly—affect the pores, or spaces between the grains, through which the roots of the plants must push their way, and through which air and water must reach these roots. The article Earthworm (Vol. 8, p. 825) describes the useful part that worms play in stirring the mixture, while the natural and artificial fertilizers, which supply whatever ingredients the soil lacks, are discussed in the article Manures and Manuring (Vol. 17, p. 610). An important part of this article deals with the best methods of keeping farm yard manure in such a way that it does not lose its value before it is spread over the fields, and with the use, in this connection, of the liquid-manure tank. The microbes in the soil render the farmer an enormous service by changing crude nitrogen, which plants cannot digest, into the forms in which it is indispensable to them, and this process is described in the article Bacteriology (Vol. 3, p. 164), by Professor Marshall Ward, Professor Blackman, and Professor Muir.

Sunlight and Shade, Heat and Cold, Water Enough—and Not too Much