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
It is difficult even to conceive, not to say measure, the vast
import of this solution of how to maintain, in the millions of
homes, a constantly accessible supply of absolutely fresh and
thoroughly sanitary animal food in the form of meat and eggs. The
great density of population in these countries makes the problem of
supplying eggs to the people very different from that in the United
States. Our 250,600,000 fowl in 1900 was at the rate of three to
each person but in Japan, with her 16,500,000 fowl, she had in 1906
but one for every three people. Her number per square mile of
cultivated land however was 825, while in the United States, in
1900, the number of fowls per square mile of improved farm land was
but 387. To give to Japan three fowls to each person there would
needs be an average of about nine to each acre of her cultivated
land, whereas in the United States there were in 1900 nearly two
acres of improved farm land for each fowl. We have no statistics
regarding the number of fowl in China or the number of eggs produced
but the total is very large and she exports to Japan. The large boat
load of eggs seen in Fig. 97 had just arrived from the country,
coming into Shanghai in one of her canals.
Besides applying canal mud directly to the fields in the ways
described there are other very extensive practices of composting it
with organic matter of one or another kind and of then using the
compost on the fields. The next three illustrations show some of the
steps and something of the tremendous labor of body, willingly and
cheerfully incurred, and something of the forethought practiced,
that homes may be maintained and that grandparents, parents, wives
and children need neither starve nor beg. We had reached a place
seen in Fig. 98, where eight bearers were moving winter compost to a
recently excavated pit in an adjoining field shown in Fig. 99.
Four months before the camera fixed the activity shown, men had
brought waste from the stables of Shanghai fifteen miles by water,
depositing it upon the canal bank between layers of thin mud dipped
from the canal, and left it to ferment. The eight men were removing
this compost to the pit seen in Fig. 99, then nearly filled. Near by
in the same field was a second pit seen in Fig. 100, excavated three
feet deep and rimmed about with the earth removed, making it two
feet deeper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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