Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1898: Volume LIV, No. 2, December 1898Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, December 1898: Volume LIV, No. 2, December 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
An assured supply of 128,000,000 bushels in addition to the ordinary
supply might allay the fear of scarcity and high price of bread.
It may here be observed that the low average crop per acre of the
United States has been due to the inclusion of wheat grown on land
partially exhausted by cropping or not well adapted to this grain.
The all-wheat as well as the all-cotton and all-tobacco methods of
ignorant farming or cropping year after year are now very rapidly
giving place to varied crops coupled with an increase of product
per acre. No agency has been of such service in this matter as the
Agricultural Experiment Stations, now established in almost every
State under the supervision of men of the highest capacity. Under
this system wheat, which requires a few days of machine work in the
spring and autumn, occupying very little time of the farmer himself,
is rapidly becoming the surplus or money crop of farms otherwise
maintained on the alternate products. Under such cultivation an
average crop of twenty bushels to the acre would be assured, in many
sections much more. One hundred and twenty-eight million bushels
at twenty bushels per acre would require 6,400,000 acres, or ten
thousand square miles. As an alternate with other crops in a rotation
of four, this would call for only forty thousand square miles in
varied farming. In order to satisfy the anxieties of Sir William
Crookes lest land should be taken from other necessary work, this
area might be divided among several States and Territories, say five
thousand square miles among eight. Oklahoma (38,719 square miles)
was opened to settlement only seven years since, and has yet a great
deal of unoccupied land. It will this year raise 13,000,000 bushels
of wheat from 850 square miles devoted to the crop. Give Oklahoma
five thousand square miles, the unoccupied Indian Territory (30,272
square miles) would take all the rest as soon as open; but we may
only assign five thousand square miles to that area. Five thousand
more might be assigned to the limestone section of Virginia, in the
valley of the Shenandoah and its tributaries; five thousand each to
Kentucky (40,400 square miles) and Tennessee (42,050 square miles),
while the great wheat-growing States--Kansas (82,080 square miles),
Nebraska (77,510 square miles), Minnesota (83,365 square miles),
and the two Dakotas (148,445 square miles)--would compete for the
contract each to open a little patch of five thousand square miles,
not yet adjacent to railways. We should thus have exhausted the area
called for without regard to the instant competition which would come
from California (158,360 square miles), Oregon (96,030 square miles),
and Washington (69,180 square miles), and probably from Pennsylvania
(45,215 square miles) and other Eastern or Southern States. At a
dollar per bushel in London no difficulty would be found in placing
this contract even without resort to Texas (265,780 square miles),
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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