Modern business geography

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1830562916

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-217337

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Huntington, Ellsworth http://d-nb.info/gnd/117070092; Cushing, Sumner W.

Title:: Modern business geography

Place of publication:: New York [usw.]

Publisher:: World Book Company

Year of publication:: 1930

Scope:: VIII, 352 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part one. The field of primary production

Collection:: Economics Books

The United States as a Farming Country 33 wastes it in feasting, or saves the surplus in order that he’may do less work during the next farming season. Evidence of the farmer’s intelligence. The intelligence of the American farmer shows itself in his eagerness to improve his farming methods. He is continually seeking to make his own labor more effective by the use of improved machinery, which will enable him to farm more acres or to farm the same area in a better way. On many a farm machinery is at work plowing, planting, cultivating, or reaping a crop. A machine, instead of a team, may be used to haul the crop to the market. Machinery is often employed for much of the incidental work of the farm, such as separating the cream from the milk, sawing the winter's wood, and clipping the horses. The American way of farming by machinery has been adopted to a large extent in such new countries as Canada, Argentina, and Aus- tralia, and to a less degree in the progressive parts of Europe. In tropical and oriental countries, farming is carried on chiefly with the hoe, with a simple plow drawn by horses or cattle, and with a sickle. It is no wonder that while the American farmer raises, on the average, more than two thousand dollars’ worth of products a year, the farmer in India produces crops worth only about twenty dollars there and worth only four or five times that amount in our own country with its high prices. THE ADVANTAGE OF NEW SOIL How new soil has helped the United States. In farming, new countries usually have an advantage over older countries. The ad- vantage lies chiefly in the fact that the soil has not been robbed of its plant food. It has long been known that when the soil of almost any region is first cultivated, it yields large crops; but after a few years the crops decline, and in time the yield becomes very small unless the farmer devotes much time and energy to renewing the soil by means of fertilizers and the rotation of crops, and by allowing the land to lie fallow. The fact that the yield of wheat in North Dakota fell quite steadily from 14.5 bushels of wheat, between 1886 and 1895, to 10.4 bushels, between 1914 and 1920, illustrates how the wheat crop in some of our western states fell off after the first years of cultivation. The large crops in the early years are certainly an advantage to the farmer, yet in a sense they do harm, because they lead him to be care- less of the soil and to think that he can gain wealth without much work.

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