Checking the Waste | Page 5

all, every man, woman and child in the United States, one hundred
dollars apiece. The corn crop was worth $1,720,000,000; the cotton
$850,000,000; wheat comes third with a value of $725,000,000; then
come hay, oats, and other crops in vast amounts worth hundreds of
millions of dollars. The cotton alone was worth more than the world's
output of gold and silver combined. The corn would pay for the
Panama Canal, for fifty battleships, and for the irrigation projects in the
West, with a hundred million dollars left over.
And this is all new wealth. If we build a house, we have gained the
house, but the trees of which we build it are gone. The same thing is
true of every article we manufacture. Something is taken from our store
in the making. But after we have taken these wonderful crops from our
farms the land is still there, and the soil is just as ready to produce a
good crop the next year, and the next, and the next, if we treat it
properly.
This matter of soil conservation is of the greatest importance to every
one of us. If you are to own a farm, or rent a farm, or till a garden, or
plant an orchard ten years from now, it will make a great difference to

you whether the man who owns it from now until then knows how to
care for it so as to make it produce well, or whether, by neglect, he
allows it to become poorer each year. It will make a far greater
difference if twenty years elapse.
It makes a difference to the farmer whether he gets twelve bushels of
wheat to the acre, or whether he gets twenty, for the cost of producing
the smaller amount is just as great as the cost of producing the larger,
and the extra bushels are all profit. It makes a difference whether a
garden furnishes all the fruit and vegetables needed by the family, or
whether it does not even pay for cultivation, and the food must be
bought at high prices. It makes even more difference to the dweller in
the city, who must buy all that he eats, whether food is abundant or not.
If food is abundant, prices are low, but when the yield is small the
demand is so great that prices become high.
Not only the men, but the women and children as well, are affected by
these food values, because it is from the extra money left over after the
actual cost of living is taken out that the clothing, the house-furnishings,
books, pictures, music, travel and all the pleasures of life must come.
Great as are our harvests, we are not raising much more than enough
for our present needs. Each year we are using more of our food at home,
and have less to export to other countries. In a few years more the
public lands will all be taken, and there will be comparatively little
more land than we now cultivate to supply a population that will be
many times as great as at present.
Men who watch the great movements of the world tell us that the time
is coming before many years when there will not be food enough to
supply all our people, when we shall be buying food from other
countries instead of selling to them, when we shall have famine instead
of plenty unless we realize the danger and at once set about to make the
most of every acre of our land.
James J. Hill, the great railroad builder of the Northwest, and one of the
best informed men of the country on food production and the increase
of population, is doing a great work in pointing out these dangers to the

people on every possible occasion.
Watching the great food-producing region of the country, he has noted
that each year the yield per acre is growing less, and the population
steadily more. He tells us that when our first census was taken only
four per cent. of the people lived in cities, that fifty years ago one-third
of the people lived in cities, and two-thirds in the country, that is,
two-thirds of the people were furnishing food to the remainder. Now
conditions are almost exactly reversed. Only one-third remain in the
country, and must supply the food, not only for themselves, but for all
the two-thirds who are not food producers, so that the food supply is
lagging far behind the demand. The price of corn has advanced from
twenty-five cents to sixty-five cents a bushel in ten years, and this in
turn raises the price of live stock. And so all along the line. Prices are
growing higher all the time because not enough food is being