Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, and
Washington combined far exceed the above list in wheat production;
but, as I have no complete data from these States, I can only say that
the national or census statistics, as far as they go, develop
corresponding conditions to those above given. The very small product
of Texas and Montana, even of Idaho, as compared with the claimed
potential, will attract notice, and perhaps excite incredulity. But
let it be remembered that in 1880 the Territory of Dakota yielded less
than 3,000,000 bushels of wheat, while in 1898 the two States of North
and South Dakota, formerly in one Territory, claim to have produced
100,000,000 bushels. Perhaps it will then be admitted that the
potential of Montana, and even of Idaho, may be attained in some
measure corresponding to the reports from those States; but as yet
their product is a negligible quantity, as that of Dakota was only
twenty years since.[9]
Again, let it be remembered that Texas will produce a cotton crop,
marketed in 1898-'99, above the average of the five ante-war crops of
the whole country, and nearly equal to the largest crop ever grown in
the United States before the war. Texas could not only produce the
present entire cotton crop of the United States but of the world, on
but a small part of her land which is well suited to cotton. When
these facts are considered, perhaps the potential of that great State
in wheat and other grain, in cattle and in sheep, as well as in
cotton, may begin to be comprehended.
The writer is well aware that this treatment of a great problem is
very incomplete, but it is the best that the leisure hours of a very
busy business life would permit. If it discloses the general ignorance
of our resources, the total inadequacy of many of our official
statistics, the lack of any real agricultural survey, and the
necessity for a reorganization and concentration of the scientific
departments of the Government as well as of a permanent census bureau,
it will have served a useful purpose.
If it also serves to call attention to the meager average crops and
the poor quality of our agriculture as a whole down to a very recent
period, it may suggest even to those to whose minds the statistics of
the past convey but gloomy and "doubtful views" of the future, that
the true progress in scientific agriculture could only begin when
substantially all the fertile land in the possession of the Government
had either been given away or otherwise distributed. So long as "sod
crops" and the single-crop system yielded adequate returns to
unskilled farmers, no true science of agriculture could be expected,
any more than a large product of wool can be hoped for in States where
it has been wittily said that "every poor man keeps one cur dog, and
every d--d poor man keeps two or more."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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