Three Acres and Liberty. Bolton Hall

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СКАЧАТЬ farmer thinks that he has done well if he gets a hundred and fifty or two hundred bushels of potatoes from an acre; he does not know that others have gotten 1284 bushels.

      ("Mr. Knight, whose name is well known to every horticulturist in England, Once dug out of his fields no less than 1284 bushels of potatoes, or thirty-four tons and nine hundreds weight (about 34 bushels to the ton), on a single acre; and at a recent competition in Minnesota, 1120 bushels, or thirty tons, could be ascertained as having been grown on one acre." P. Kropotkin's "Fields, Factories and Workshops," page 114.)

      Let us realize what an acre means. An acre is a square about 209 feet each way, 4840 square yards of land. A New York City avenue block is about 200 feet long from house corner to house corner. It has eight city lots 25 X 100 in its front; about double that space (17–⅖ lots) makes an acre.

      An ordinary one-horse cart holds twenty bushels, so then a full crop of potatoes from that space would fill 56 carts.

      To raise potatoes as an ordinary farmer raises them, requires him to go over the ground not less than a dozen times, plowing, harrowing, marking, planting, cultivating, three times weeding, three times for bugs, and digging; it would pay him to go over it much oftener.

      If he plants his rows of potatoes three feet apart, to allow for horse cultivation, he has 69 rows of 200 feet each; which makes him walk at least thirty-three miles over each acre. If he has a twenty-acre lot in potatoes, he walks each year more than 650 miles over the field and gets, let us say, 150 bushels of poor potatoes per acre, or 3000 bushels off his twenty-acre field.

      Now suppose he cultivates the soil, instead of just "raising a crop," and gets 600 bushels of fine potatoes to the acre, he need plant only five acres, walk only 200 miles, and, because his potatoes are choice and early, get many times the price that his pedestrian neighbor gets. It is much easier to grow 200,000 lb. of feed on one acre than to grow them on ten acres.

      To cultivate is to watch the soil as you would watch your cooking and to tend the crop as you would tend your animals. The crop is as alive as the stock and as easily gets sick.

      If an ordinary farmer rents 60 acres at $5.00 per acre, a moderate rent for good land, he pays out in cash $300, besides farm wages. If he buys it, his interest and taxes will amount to nearly as much; but if he tills but five acres intelligently, he can get as much out of it as out of an ordinary farm, and even if his rent be as high as $30 per acre for well situated land, he is $150 to the good; besides, doing the work himself, he has no drain of capital for wages.

      Large barns and shelter for help being unnecessary, he can live in a cheap shack till he accumulates enough for proper buildings. Many of the successful vacant lot farmers live in a tent or in shanties made of old boxes and such like.

      Of course, if we have the knowledge and ability and the capital and can give it the attention, it is more profitable to cultivate on a large scale than on a small one, because in that case each worker necessarily produces more than he gets as wages—and we pocket the difference.

      Most American farmers are holding land that somebody ought to pay them a bonus for working, else they must come out of the little end of the horn. They get poor or poorly situated land, because it costs less, and then put three or four hundred dollars' worth of labor and money a year into the land and take out four or five hundred dollars' worth of crops.

      The farmer thinks he must have big fields to feed his cattle, and that he must have cattle to keep the big fields fertilized, so he raises hay.

      In that he makes two mistakes; hay, like most other low-priced crops, is risky—the cost of harvesting is high and the margin of profit small. A week of wet weather at cutting time or the impossibility of getting enough men and machines in the week when it should be cut, may make a loss.

      But the scientific dairy man does not take that risk, nor let his cattle use up this fodder by wandering over the fields in search of tid-bits of grass or clover, or, goaded by the flies, trampling more grass than they eat and wasting their manure.

      He keeps the cows in cool sheds, feeds them on cut fodder, and saves every ounce of the manure.

      The modern cow is a ruminating machine for producing milk and cares little for exercise and needs little. To exploit the cattle as employers exploit the factory hands, he gives the cows a cool, shady place and food, and they stand there all day long to their profit and his.

      (United States Agricultural Bulletin No. 22 says: "The New Jersey Experiment Station has been conducting a practical trial in soiling dairy cows for a number of years past, and finds that complete soiling is entirely practicable, i.e. that green foliage crops may serve as the sole food of the dewy herd, aside from the grain ration, without injury to the animals and with a considerable saving in the cost of milk.

      "Under the soiling system a large number of animals can be kept upon a given acreage and by allowing open-air exercises in a large yard or pasture the practice has been demonstrated as entirely feasible for dairy animals.

      "One acre of soiling crops produced sufficient fodder for an equivalent of 3 cows for six months. Rye, corn, crimson clover, alfalfa, oats and peas, and millets have been found to furnish food more economically than any other green crops in that locality. A grain rotation was always fed in addition to the soiling crops.")

      Although we can feed a cow on less than an acre by raising forage crops, she needs to be milked every day at regular hours, and the milk, as well as the cans and the cow, need to be cared for—and she cannot wait.

      The stock-raiser has a different proposition; he needs fields and grass; but if time and available labor is limited, we had better specialize on the garden—unlike the farmers.

      The farmers are not to blame that they do not usually cultivate the land intelligently. They are mostly cut off from the educational advantages of the cities by distance and by bad roads.

      Usually, that is because, desirable land being held at speculative prices, they are forced to places where the farm itself is worth less than the good improvements on it cost. Sometimes it is because, also, the land is poor or worn out; more often because it is thoughtlessly managed, nearly always because the land-hungry farmer has taken ten times as much land as he needs for farming. In the hope of a rise that often does not come, nearly all have bought more land than they can take good care of with limited capital and scarcity of help.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ