THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 1908. AMERICAN AGRICULTURE.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9112, 11 June 1908, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, JUNE 11, 1908. AMERICAN AGRICULTURE.

Mr James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway, recently delivered a lecture on the future of the United States, which contained much of special significance to New Zealand farmers. He declared that thero was every probability of the population of the United States increasing during the next twenty years to the enormous total of 130,000,000, and that within fortyfour years the country will contain over 200,000,000 poople. At the present rate of land settlement, he estimates that every acre of public 'and will be absorbed within fifteen years, and as the great bulk of unsettled Government land is wholly or partially unfit for tillage, he believes that in

quite a short time the United States will not only absorb all its own agricultural produce, tut will actually have to import large and increasing quantities, unless a better system of tillage than that in vogue now is inaugurated. We have seen.how the increase of population in Germany has transformed that country from a competitor in the British butter market to a larger importer of that material. In the near future we may see the United States transformed from a competitor in our overseas meat markets to a large importer of muttm and beef. Business men who have studied the question declare that even now there is a profitable opening for New Zealand frozen mutton on the Pacific Coast of America, and without doubt the prospect* of such a market will improve as population in the States increases. Mr Hill does not hesitate to speak very plainly to Americans on what he calls their wasteful method of farming, although in the United States farmers have fifty per cent, of their land under tillage. Mr Hill says:— "America is pre-eminently and primarily an agricultural country. Its soil has been treated as have been the forest and the mineral resources of the nation. Only because the earth is more long-suffering, only because the process of exhaustion is more difficult, and occupies a longer period, have we escaped the peril that looms so large in other quarters. The reckless distribution of the land; the appropriation of large areas for grazing purposes, have absorbed much of the national heritage. Only one-half of the land in private owner- ' ship is tilled. That tillage does not produce one-half of what the land might be made to yield without los- • ing an atom of its fertility. AgriI culture in the moat intelligent meaning of the term is something almost unknown in the United States. We ha/ealight scratching of the soil, and a gathering of all that it can be- " made to yield by the most rapidlyexhausting methods. Except in isolated instances, on small tracts here and ther-% farmed by people sometimes regarded as cranks, and at some experiment stations, there is no attempt to deal with the soil scientifically,. generously, or even fairly. In manufactures we have ' come to consider small economies so carefully that the difference of a frac- ' tion of a cent., the utilisation of a by-product of something formerly consigned to th j scrap heap, makes the difference between a profit and bankruptcy. In farming we are ' satisfied with a small yield, at the expense of the most rapid soil deterioration. We are satisfied with a > national average small product of £2 7s 4d per acre, at a cost of a diminishing annual return from the same fields, when we might as well secure ». from two to three times that sum.' Mr Hill has much to say regarding the possibilities of improving agriculture in America, and nearly everything he says can be made to apply to New Zealand. We cannot make . the best returns from our lan! whilst the bulk of it is in grass. We cannot increase our butter supplies and we cannot increase, our frozen meat exports. It is by cultivation, and yet more cultivation, that we shall increase our prosperity, and by scientific methods and patient skill increase the productiveness of our land.