The Vegetable Farm and the Truck Garden 67 
3. 
Find a short newspaper item about vegetables, perhaps a market report 
giving the prices and relative abundance of vegetables. Paste it at the 
top of a sheet of paper, and on the same paper write the name and date of 
the newspaper and your comment on what the clipping shows as to the re- 
lation of vegetables to climate, season, soil, markets, and transportation. 
How hungry populations depend on the potato. 
Potatoes produce a greater amount of food value per acre than almost 
any of the other main crops except corn. Explain how the introduction 
of the potato into Europe more than four hundred years ago helped 
to make possible a great increase in European population. 
Few countries have increased in population more rapidly than Germany 
during the last one hundred years. How does her standing among potato- 
producing countries help to explain this fact 
In the seven principal potato-producing countries of the world, the total 
annual yield and the average yield per acre (1921-1927) were as follows : 
D. 
1. 
COUNTRY 
—- Sop 
~AGE PER 
ACRE 
Russia . 
Germany 
Poland . 
France. . . 
United States 
Czechoslovakia 
United Kingdom 
508,800,000 ~u 
257,000,007) hu. 
993,000,003 bu. 
470,400,000 bu. 
391,000,0") hu. 
251,990,561) hu 
165.000.000 bu 
JU. 
hu. 
bu. 
bu. 
hu. 
pb! 
Compare these countries in density of population. What effect will an 
increasingly dense population in the United States perhaps have upon 
the yield per acre? What feature of the climate of the United States 
is partly responsible for the low yield here? Why do not the densely 
populated countries of the Orient raise potatoes? 
Explain how the bulk and weight of the potato cause it to be a 
widely distributed crop in the United States. Give another reason. 
E. An illustration of how a ‘‘ new ’’ vegetable enters commerce. 
1. The soy bean is a new vegetable to the people of the western hemi- 
sphere, but it has formed an important article of diet in China and Japan 
for centuries. The United States is rapidly increasing its purchases and 
production of soy beans. Why is the soy bean valuable? Find 
out what our Department of Agriculture says about it. (Year Book of the 
Department of Agriculture, 1917, 1923, and the January, 1919. issue of Asia 
give interesting information about soy beans.) 
The recent demand of America and Europe is encouraging hundreds of 
Chinese families to move to new lands in Manchuria to take up the culture 
of the soy bean, even though the price the Manchurian farmers receive 
is as low as a cent or less a pound. Why is so low a price an inducement 
to a Chinese farmer and not to an American farmer ?