Three Acres and Liberty. Bolton Hall
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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 on them, however, is small compared to the rice, millet, and wheat raised in China, India, and Russia, and is insignificant compared to the amount of produce grown on the myriad little farm plots.
A comparison of productions as taken from the 12th and 13th United States Censuses in the bonanza farm states shows that the yield of wheat was:
while New England shows 23.5 bu. per acre.
In 1899 In 1909
Minnesota 14.5 bu. per acre 17.4
North Dakota 13.5 bu. per acre 14.3
South Dakota 10.5 bu. per acre 14.6
By 1917 these largely increased, but the differences remain.
"The average extent of land tilled by one family in Japan does not exceed one hectare" (2.471 acres), less than two and a half acres. ("Japan in the Beginning of the Twentieth Century," page 89. Published by the Department of Agriculture and Commerce of Japan.)
"Farm households contain on an average 5.8 persons, of whom two and a half persons per family may be regarded of an age capable of doing effective work."
"So that here we have more than one person working on each acre and each acre supporting more than two persons, notwithstanding that their 22,000,000 tenant farmers pay sometimes four fifths of their product as rent." (Same, page 103.)
Denmark, one of the best agricultural countries and probably one of the happiest communities on earth, reported
1,900 farms of 250–300 acres,
74,000 farms averaging 100 acres,
150,000 farms averaging 7 to 10 acres,
1,050 cooperative dairies, and so on.
And so impressed has the ruling class there become with the advantage of this that the Government will supply the poor worker nine tenths of the means necessary to buy a small farm.
Says Kropotkin, "the small island of Jersey, eight miles long and less than six miles wide, still remains a land of open field culture; but, although it comprises only 28,707 acres (nearly 45 square miles), rocks included, it nourishes a population of about two inhabitants to each acre, or 1300 inhabitants to the square mile, and there is not one writer on agriculture who, after having paid a visit to this island, does not praise the well-being of the Jersey peasants and the admirable results which they obtain in their small farms of from five to twenty acres—very often less than five acres—by means of a rational and intensive culture.
"Most of my readers will probably be astonished to learn that the soil of Jersey, which consists of decomposed granite, with no organic matter in it, is not at all of surprising fertility, and that its climate, though more sunny than the climate of the British Isles, offers many drawbacks on account of the small amount of sun heat during the summer and of the cold winds in spring."
("The successes accomplished lately in Jersey are entirely due to the amount of labor which a dense population is putting on the land; to a system of land-tenure,