In addition, the farms have held out such poor prospects of fortune that the smarter and more enterprising boys and girls have left them for the towns, leaving behind the duller and more conservative to the mercy of the railroads and other monopolies. What wonder, then, that the overworked and struggling farmer finds little chance to study, or to investigate and invest in fertilizers or even in modern methods of agriculture. No wonder farming does not pay if a "farmer" means a stupid man with neither training for, nor knowledge of, his business. Those who have the knowledge seldom have the experience and those who have the experience seldom have the knowledge. The bonanza farms of the West are other samples of great areas of the most productive land in the United States being used most unscientifically. By the methods used, the land produces less per acre than land in the East which is not so good. Accordingly, we find that the bonanza farm plan, where great areas of wheat are worked by machines with labor employed only in the seed time and harvest, is rapidly breaking up. As the land becomes valuable and is taxed, such wasteful, wholesale methods do not pay as well as it pays to rent or sell the land to farmers, who each for themselves attend to details of the business. Consequently, most of those farms are being sold off. The whole amount of wheat ever raised on them, however, is small compared to the rice, millet, and wheat raised in China, India, and Russia, and is insignificant compared to the amount of produce grown on the myriad little farm plots. A comparison of productions as taken from the 12th and 13th United States Censuses in the bonanza farm states shows that the yield of wheat was: while New England shows 23.5 bu. per acre. In 1899 In 1909 Minnesota 14.5 bu. per acre 17.4 North Dakota 13.5 bu. per acre 14.3 South Dakota 10.5 bu. per acre 14.6 By 1917 these largely increased, but the differences remain. "The average extent of land tilled by one family in Japan does not exceed one hectare" (2.471 acres), less than two and a half acres. ("Japan in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century," page 89. Published by the Department of Agriculture and Commerce of Japan.) "Farm households contain on an average 5.8 persons, of whom two and a half persons per family may be regarded of an age capable of doing effective work." "So that here we have more than one person working on each acre and each acre supporting more than two persons, notwithstanding that their 22,000,000 tenant farmers pay sometimes four fifths of their product as rent." (Same, page 103.) Denmark, one of the best agricultural countries and probably one of the happiest communities on earth, reported 1,900 farms of 250-300 acres, 74,000 farms averaging 100 acres, 150,000 farms averaging 7 to 10 acres, 1,050 cooperative dairies, and so on.