SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE.

Colonist, Volume LIV, Issue 13270, 22 November 1911, Page 3

SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE.

Scientists and economists in the United States are quite awake to tho impor-tanco of scientific agriculture. The only point on which they seem to differ is whether farmers will wake up to its importance in sufficient numbers to give a new impetus-to the oldest of all industries. President Taft thinks that they will. Speaking at the National Conservation Congress recently held at Kansas City, hV expressed his strong conviction that overt with the prospect of .6 doubled population in 1060, "America will continue to. feed her millions, and feed them well, out of her own soil." Au American paper considers this quite possible, because, "by intensive farming and a study of the- market, the farmer has already learned to increase enormously his contribution to the world's supply of food." But the farhior is naturally slow to change his methods, and it is in this innate conservatism that the president of the Congress, Mr. Henry Wallace, sees cause for dread. He points out that production was naturally increased wiien the new machinery took the place of the old hand tools. But though the farmer had learned how to break up the soil and obtain its products with less labour, he had not acquired the scientific knowledge which would have helped him to apply his new inventions to the best advantage, and the result had betm, to a great extent, merely soil impoverishment.

"The nineteenth century farmer," ho declares, "was, speaking generally, no farmer at all, but a miner, a soil robber. There was ■- a good farmer here and there, a good settlement here and there-, but speaking generally, there was no farming, nothing but mining. The nineteenth century farmer sold the stored fertility of ages at the bare cost of mining it. With his gang-plough and his four to eight section harrow, ho could do more soil robbing in five years than his grandfather could do in his whole lifetime It is hard to get farmers of this class to understand the philosophy of crop rotation, of the natural movement of water in the soil, or of the ideal seedbed or the fitness of certain soils for certain crops —in short, of the requirements of plant and animal life, or to persuade them to active cooperation with each other, or to got them in actual touch and sympathy with the new agriculture. This is an educational process, and therefore slow, even when there is a disposition to acquire the knowledge."

The New York "Times," which agrees with Mr. Wallace that in the nineteenth century farms were almost ruined by incompetents, also deplores the" slow spread of modern methods. "The old, ignorant farmer," it insists, "must disappear, if the country is to fulfil its destiny. The real farmers of this hour, the men who are makinf farming pay, are the equals of the city .mnn in breadth of culture and knowledge of the world. But thero are to< few of them." "