The most fertile sections of Mexico are rich indeed, and in the plateau valleys, where alluvial deposits and lava dust have been poured in together to form the soil, great crops can be raised--when there is rain. Only in a relatively limited section, however, is rain sure to come at the times needed by the crops. Often when it does come, it is in torrential downpours which are likely to wash cultivated fields away in a single night. It is this condition which makes the so-called _tierra templada_, on the slopes of the mountains, in many ways the least desirable of all the farming land of Mexico. Uncertainty of rainfall is, then, one of the outstanding results of the Mexican climate as influenced by Mexican geography. This uncertainty works forever upon the mind of the Mexican farmer, making him a hopeless fatalist, making it less than worth his while to attempt scientific cultivation. If there is rain, his crops are good anyway, and if there is not rain, the cost of labor and fertilizer and good seed are lost. The Mexican farmer is the worst of gamblers, and his fondest hope is that his average crop over a period of years will be twenty-five per cent of normal! Famine has ravaged Mexico periodically for thousands of years. It is most interesting, in looking at the present stage (when the largest items of import are foodstuffs), to realize that it has probably been only the much-abused hacienda system which has saved Mexico from severe ravages of recent famine. The hacienda system, which is the operation of huge estates under an elaborate overseership, approaches as nearly as the living conditions of the country permit to a businesslike administration of the farming of the land. It was the stable factor in Mexican food production in the time of the Spaniards and in the later era of Diaz. The small farmer of Mexico has worked, since the beginning of Indian history, without a thought of supplying the market and thus feeding the industrial workers of the towns. He has lived from hand to mouth, and only when he chances to have a surplus does he transport it or sell it on the ground for the needs of the city market. So true is this that in the period of mining and industrial expansion under Diaz, the draining of the labor from the haciendas to the mines and to the few factories had an immediate effect on the food production, and the imports of foreign corn and wheat grew almost in exact proportion to the diversion of this labor to industry. The small farmers, the Indians and peons, who had places of their own or worked in the village commons, did not go to the mines, but continued their relatively easy existence on their own little _fincas_. They learned only slowly the possibilities of the increased market for their product, and only to an infinitesimal degree did they rise to meet that market.