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.