Farmers of Forty Centuries | Page 2

the applications of physics and devices to
agriculture. Whatever he touched he illuminated.

CONTENTS

PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
FIRST GLIMPSES OF JAPAN
GRAVE LANDS OF CHINA

TO HONGKONG AND CANTON
UP THE SI-KIANG, WEST RIVER
EXTENT OF CANALIZATION AND SURFACE FITTING OF
FIELDS
SOME CUSTOMS OF THE COMMON PEOPLE
THE FUEL PROBLEM, BUILDING AND TEXTILE MATERIALS
TRAMPS AFIELD
THE UTILIZATION OF WASTE
IN THE SHANTUNG PROVINCE
ORIENTALS CROWD BOTH TIME AND SPACE
RICE CULTURE IN THE ORIENT
SILK CULTURE
THE TEA INDUSTRY
ABOUT TIENTSIN
MANCHURIA AND KOREA
RETURN TO JAPAN

INTRODUCTION

A word of introduction is needed to place the reader at the best view
point from which to consider what is said in the following pages
regarding the agricultural practices and customs of China, Korea and
Japan. It should be borne in mind that the great factors which today
characterize, dominate and determine the agricultural and other
industrial operations of western nations were physical impossibilities to
them one hundred years ago, and until then had been so to all people.
It should be observed, too, that the United States as yet is a nation of
but few people widely scattered over a broad virgin land with more
than twenty acres to the support of every man, woman and child, while
the people whose practices are to be considered are toiling in fields
tilled more than three thousand years and who have scarcely more than
two acres per capita,* more than one-half of which is uncultivable
mountain land.
*[Footnote: This figure was wrongly stated in the first edition as one
acre, owing to a mistake in confusing the area of cultivated land with
total area.]
Again, the great movement of cargoes of feeding stuffs and mineral

fertilizers to western Europe and to the eastern United States began less
than a century ago and has never been possible as a means of
maintaining soil fertility in China, Korea or Japan, nor can it be
continued indefinitely in either Europe or America. These importations
are for the time making tolerable the waste of plant food materials
through our modern systems of sewage disposal and other faulty
practices; but the Mongolian races have held all such wastes, both
urban and rural, and many others which we ignore, sacred to agriculture,
applying them to their fields.
We are to consider some of the practices of a virile race of some five
hundred millions of people who have an unimpaired inheritance
moving with the momentum acquired through four thousand years; a
people morally and intellectually strong, mechanically capable, who are
awakening to a utilization of all the possibilities which science and
invention during recent years have brought to western nations; and a
people who have long dearly loved peace but who can and will fight in
self defense if compelled to do so.
We had long desired to stand face to face with Chinese and Japanese
farmers; to walk through their fields and to learn by seeing some of
their methods, appliances and practices which centuries of stress and
experience have led these oldest farmers in the world to adopt. We
desired to learn how it is possible, after twenty and perhaps thirty or
even forty centuries, for their soils to be made to produce sufficiently
for the maintenance of such dense populations as are living now in
these three countries. We have now had this opportunity and almost
every day we were instructed, surprised and amazed at the conditions
and practices which confronted us whichever way we turned; instructed
in the ways and extent to which these nations for centuries have been
and are conserving and utilizing their natural resources, surprised at the
magnitude of the returns they are getting from their fields, and amazed
at the amount of efficient human labor cheerfully given for a daily
wage of five cents and their food, or for fifteen cents, United States
currency, without food.
The three main islands of Japan in 1907 had a population of 46,977,003
maintained on 20,000 square miles of cultivated field. This is at the rate
of more than three people to each acre, and of 2,349 to each square
mile; and yet the total agricultural imports into Japan in 1907 exceeded

the agricultural exports by less than one dollar per capita. If the
cultivated land of Holland is estimated at but one-third of her total area,
the density of her population in 1905 was, on this basis, less than
one-third that of Japan in her three main islands. At the same time
Japan is feeding 69 horses and 56 cattle, nearly all laboring animals, to
each square mile of cultivated field, while we were feeding in 1900 but
30 horses and mules per same area, these being our laboring animals.
As coarse food transformers Japan was maintaining 16,500,000
domestic fowl, 825