Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan — John Shaqi
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and JapanKing, F. H. (Franklin Hiram)
Science
Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan
King, F. H. (Franklin Hiram)
Agriculture -- China; Agriculture -- Japan; Agriculture -- Korea
How closely the ground itself may be crowded with plants is seen in
Fig. 16, where a young peach orchard, whose tree tops were six feet
through, planted in rows twenty-two feet apart, had also ten rows of
cabbage, two rows of large windsor beans and a row of garden peas.
Thirteen rows of vegetables in 22 feet, all luxuriant and strong,
and note the judgment shown in placing the tallest plants, needing
the most sun, in the center between the trees.
But these old people, used to crowding and to being crowded, and
long ago capable of making four blades of grass grow where Nature
grew but one, have also learned how to double the acreage where a
crop needs more elbow than it does standing room, as seen in Fig.
17. This man's garden had an area of but 63 by 68 feet and two
square rods of this was held sacred to the family grave mound, and
yet his statement of yields, number of crops and prices made his
earning $100 a year on less than one-tenth of an acre.
His crop of cucumbers on less than .06 of an acre would bring him
$20. He had already sold $5 worth of greens and a second crop would
follow the cucumbers. He had just irrigated his garden from an
adjoining canal, using a foot-power pump, and stated that until it
rained he would repeat the watering once per week. It was his wife
who stood in the garden and, although wearing trousers, her dress
showed full regard for modesty.
But crowding crops more closely in the field not only requires
higher feeding to bring greater returns, but also relatively greater
care, closer watchfulness in a hundred ways and a patience far
beyond American measure; and so, before the crowding of the crops in
the field and along with it, there came to these very old farmers a
crowding of the grey matter in the brain with the evolution of
effective texture. This is shown in his fields which crowd the
landscape. It is seen in the crops which crowd his fields. You see
it in the old man's face, Fig. 18, standing opposite his compeer,
Prince Ching, Fig. 19, each clad in winter dress which is the
embodiment of conversation, retaining the fires of the body for its
own needs, to release the growth on mountain sides for other uses.
And when one realizes how, nearly to the extreme limits,
conservation along all important lines is being practiced as an
inherited instinct, there need be no surprise when one reflects that
the two men, one as feeder and the other as leader, are standing in
the fore of a body of four hundred millions of people who have
marched as a nation through perhaps forty centuries, and who now, in
the light and great promise of unfolding science have their faces
set toward a still more hopeful and longer future.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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