Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/360

354 is the rural problem? And in the answer may be revealed, without need of extended discussion, the mission of the college.

1. The days are going by when agriculture may be classed with the mining industries. Soil culture is supplanting pioneer farming. Skill is taking the place of empiricism. The despotism of the grandfather is passing. Applied science and business practise have been hitched to the plow. Yet the most obvious need of American agriculture is better farming. Improved farm land in the United States gives but nine dollars of gross return per acre; the average yield per acre of corn is 23.5 bushels, whereas a very modest ideal would be double this amount; the wheat yield is 13.5 bushels per acre, in Germany nearly twice as much. These are crude but legitimate illustrations of our inferior farming. We must have greater yields of better products, secured at less cost per unit. The farm problem is, therefore, first of all a problem of increasing the technical skill of our farmers. Science unlocks the cabinet of nature's treasures, but only the artist-farmer can appreciate and use the storehouse thus opened to him.

2. But produce-growing is not the only aspect of the farm problem. Each effective pair of shears needs two blades; in this case produceselling is the other blade. Mere productiveness does not solve the farm question. The farmer cares less for the second spear of grass than he does for a proper return from the first spear. Business skill must be added to better farming methods. The farm problem is also a business question.

3. The moment, however, we begin to discuss price we enter a realm where economic factors dominate. We commonly say demand and supply determine price; but effective demand and effective supply are the resultants of many forces. The supply of a given product is influenced by the cost of growing in various locations, by cost of transportation, by competition of other countries. The demand is influenced by the state of wages, by standards of living, by effectiveness of distribution. The farmer may not always control these conditions, but he must reckon with them. He must know the laws of economics as well as the laws of soil-fertility. The farm problem becomes then an industrial question; for the farmer's prosperity is influenced most profoundly by the economic life of the nation and of the world. And in a still wider sense is the rural question one of economics. The industry as a whole must prosper. It is of no great moment that here and there a farmer succeeds. The farming class must prosper. Of course individual success in the case of a sufficient number of farmers implies the success of the industry. But it is quite possible to have a stagnant industry alongside numerous individual successes. The farmers as a whole must be continually and speedily advancing to better economic conditions.