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
"A careful study of farm methods among Minnesota farmers discloses
this fact: Some wheat growers, with the best farm machinery, and
employing the best methods of agriculture, make a profit in wheat
raising of from ten to fifteen cents a bushel more than do their
less intelligent and less progressive neighbors. Now, the tendency
in the State and throughout the Northwest is to bring, by education
and a general exchange of methods, the poorer farmers up to the
level of the best. This change is rapidly taking place. It will not
require fifteen years to realize its consummation. When the methods
and facilities of the average farmer are brought up to the level of
the best of the present time, this change, with the change above
noted in transportation charges, will add to the average profit of
Minnesota farmers in growing wheat a total of not less than fifteen
and possibly of over twenty cents a bushel. Such a change would
more than double the existing net profit of the wheat grower in
the Northwest. Could it be maintained for a series of years, as is
presupposed under Mr. Atkinson's supposition of London prices, it
would furnish such an incentive to wheat growing in Minnesota and
the surrounding territory as has as yet never been experienced. A
million families of immigrants would pour into the great Northwest
within the next twenty to twenty-five years. They would take up all
the existing vacant lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas. The lands
suitable for irrigation in these States and in Montana would be set
to growing wheat. The wave of humanity anxious to raise wheat for
a dollar a bushel in London would sweep past the boundaries of the
four States mentioned, and carry the cultivation of that cereal all
over Manitoba, Assiniboia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. In these four
British provinces and in the four American States, dollar wheat in
London would in twenty years open more acres of good land to wheat
than are now subject to the plow within their borders. Even then the
beginning only would have been made to the possibilities of wheat
culture in the British Northwest. Settlements would not have extended
as far north as St. Petersburg in Russia; neither would settlers
have trenched upon the lands with a climate as severe as that of the
Russian metropolis.
"The foregoing is a brief statement of what dollar wheat in London
would do for one section of North America in stimulating wheat
cultivation. If that statement is based upon a true conception, as
the writer believes it is, of the possibilities of the American
Northwest, it demonstrates how impossible it will be to maintain
dollar wheat in London for any great length of time in the future.
It also shows that Mr. Atkinson is wrong in not asserting a sure
continuation of that decline in wheat prices which he so fully
predicted in 1880."
_Cost of Shipping Wheat per Bushel from Moorhead, an Interior Point
in Minnesota, to Liverpool._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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