Farmers of Forty Centuries | Page 5

in addition enormous volumes of the run-off from
adjacent uncultivable mountain country. Wherever paddy fields are
practicable there rice is grown. In the three main islands of Japan 56
per cent of the cultivated fields, 11,000 square miles, is laid out for rice
growing and is maintained under water from transplanting to near
harvest time, after which the land is allowed to dry, to be devoted to
dry land crops during the balance of the year, where the season permits.
To anyone who studies the agricultural methods of the Far East in the
field it is evident that these people, centuries ago, came to appreciate
the value of water in crop production as no other nations have. They
have adapted conditions to crops and crops to conditions until with rice
they have a cereal which permits the most intense fertilization and at
the same time the ensuring of maximum yields against both drought
and flood. With the practice of western nations in all humid climates,
no matter how completely and highly we fertilize, in more years than
not yields are reduced by a deficiency or an excess of water.
It is difficult to convey, by word or map, an adequate conception of the
magnitude of the systems of canalization which contribute primarily to
rice culture. A conservative estimate would place the miles of canals in
China at fully 200,000 and there are probably more miles of canal in
China, Korea and Japan than there are miles of railroad in the United
States. China alone has as many acres in rice each year as the United
States has in wheat and her annual product is more than double and
probably threefold our annual wheat crop, and yet the whole of the rice
area produces at least one and sometimes two other crops each year.
The selection of the quick-maturing, drought-resisting millets as the
great staple food crops to be grown wherever water is not available for
irrigation, and the almost universal planting in hills or drills, permitting
intertillage, thus adopting centuries ago the utilization of earth mulches
in conserving soil moisture, has enabled these people to secure
maximum returns in seasons of drought and where the rainfall is small.
The millets thrive in the hot summer climates; they survive when the
available soil moisture is reduced to a low limit, and they grow
vigorously when the heavy rains come. Thus we find in the Far East,
with more rainfall and a better distribution of it than occurs in the
United States, and with warmer, longer seasons, that these people have
with rare wisdom combined both irrigation and dry farming methods to

an extent and with an intensity far beyond anything our people have
ever dreamed, in order that they might maintain their dense
populations.
Notwithstanding the fact that in each of these countries the soils are
naturally more than ordinarily deep, inherently fertile and enduring,
judicious and rational methods of fertilization are everywhere practiced;
but not until recent years, and only in Japan, have mineral commercial
fertilizers been used. For centuries, however, all cultivated lands,
including adjacent hill and mountain sides, the canals, streams and the
sea have been made to contribute what they could toward the
fertilization of cultivated fields and these contributions in the aggregate
have been large. In China, in Korea and in Japan all but the inaccessible
portions of their vast extent of mountain and hill lands have long been
taxed to their full capacity for fuel, lumber and herbage for green
manure and compost material; and the ash of practically all of the fuel
and of all of the lumber used at home finds its way ultimately to the
fields as fertilizer.
In China enormous quantities of canal mud are applied to the fields,
sometimes at the rate of even 70 and more tons per acre. So, too, where
there are no canals, both soil and subsoil are carried into the villages
and there between the intervals when needed they are, at the expense of
great labor, composted with organic refuse and often afterwards dried
and pulverized before being carried back and used on the fields as
home-made fertilizers. Manure of all kinds, human and animal, is
religiously saved and applied to the fields in a manner which secures an
efficiency far above our own practices. Statistics obtained through the
Bureau of Agriculture, Japan, place the amount of human waste in that
country in 1908 at 23,950,295 tons, or 1.75 tons per acre of her
cultivated land. The International Concession of the city of Shanghai,
in 1908, sold to a Chinese contractor the privilege of entering
residences and public places early in the morning of each day in the
year and removing the night soil, receiving therefor more than $31,000,
gold, for 78,000 tons of waste. All