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
As coarse food transformers Japan was maintaining 16,500,000
domestic fowl, 825 per square mile, but only one for almost three of
her people. We were maintaining, in 1900, 250,600,000 poultry, but
only 387 per square mile of cultivated field and yet more than three
for each person. Japan's coarse food transformers in the form of
swine, goats and sheep aggregated but 13 to the square mile and
provided but one of these units for each 180 of her people while in
the United States in 1900 there were being maintained, as
transformers of grass and coarse grain into meat and milk, 95
cattle, 99 sheep and 72 swine per each square mile of improved
farms. In this reckoning each of the cattle should be counted as the
equivalent of perhaps five of the sheep and swine, for the
transforming power of the dairy cow is high. On this basis we are
maintaining at the rate of more than 646 of the Japanese units per
square mile, and more than five of these to every man, woman and
child, instead of one to every 180 of the population, as is the case
in Japan.
Correspondingly accurate statistics are not accessible for China but
in the Shantung province we talked with a farmer having 12 in his
family and who kept one donkey, one cow, both exclusively laboring
animals, and two pigs on 2.5 acres of cultivated land where he grew
wheat, millet, sweet potatoes and beans. Here is a density of
population equal to 3,072 people, 256 donkeys, 256 cattle and 512
swine per square mile. In another instance where the holding was one
and two-thirds acres the farmer had 10 in his family and was
maintaining one donkey and one pig, giving to this farm land a
maintenance capacity of 3,840 people, 384 donkeys and 384 pigs to
the square mile, or 240 people, 24 donkeys and 24 pigs to one of our
forty-acre farms which our farmers regard too small for a single
family. The average of seven Chinese holdings which we visited and
where we obtained similar data indicates a maintenance capacity for
those lands of 1,783 people, 212 cattle or donkeys and 399
swine,--1,995 consumers and 399 rough food transformers per square
mile of farm land. These statements for China represent strictly
rural populations. The rural population of the United States in 1900
was placed at the rate of 61 per square mile of improved farm land
and there were 30 horses and mules. In Japan the rural population
had a density in 1907 of 1,922 per square mile, and of horses and
cattle together 125.
The population of the large island of Chungming in the mouth of the
Yangtse river, having an area of 270 square miles, possessed,
according to the official census of 1902, a density of 3,700 per
square mile and yet there was but one large city on the island,
hence the population is largely rural.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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