Subsistence agriculture

“ Agriculture, properly so called, must naturally be in a depressed condition in a country of which the tenth part of the population is continually either in active service, or in readiness to be called out. No more corn is cultivated than is sufficient for the subsistence of the inhabitants. ”

“ These are just what were described by Arthur Young; and although it is possible, as the natives uniformly affirm, that the agriculture has improved since the revolution, this improvement must be in the details of the operations, and in the extent of land under tillage, not in the principles of the art. The most striking to the eye of a stranger are the want of enclosures, the want of pasture lands and of green crops, and the consequent number of bare fallows, on many of which a few sheep and long-legged lean hogs are turned out to pick up a miserable subsistence. ”

“ I return.
134When industry is set on foot, it gives encouragement to agriculture exercised as a trade: and by the allurements of ease, which a large surplus procures to the farmers, it does hurt to that species which is exercised as a method of subsistence. Lands become more generally and less thoroughly laboured. In some countries tillage is set on foot and encouraged; this is an operose agriculture. While industry goes forward, and while a people can remain satisfied with a nourishment consisting chiefly of bread, this system of agriculture will subsist, and will carry numbers very high. ”

“ The time devoted in these migrations, is out of all proportion, to the results obtained by agriculture, or by any other stated mode of subsistence. And the supply is after all, inadequate. Seasons of scarcity and want are the ordinary occurrences of every year; and a mere subsistence is the best state of things that is looked for.
Traders visit them annually with outfits of goods and provisions, to purchase the furs and peltries, which are gleaned in their periodical mi219grations. ”

“ By tilling the ground, I would not be understood to mean any settled mode of agriculture, requiring cattle, inclosures, or implements of husbandry. Grain made but a very subordinate part of their subsistence, which was chiefly derived from fishing and hunting. The little they had was maize; this, with kidney-beans and tobacco, the only plants they cultivated, was sown in some very pleasant fields along the Mohawk river, by the women, who had no implements of tillage but the hoe, and a kind of wooden spade. ”

“ In regard to this extensive section of country, I do not hesitate in giving the opinion, that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence. Although tracts of fertile land considerably extensive are occasionally to be met with, yet the scarcity of wood and water, almost {237} uniformly prevalent, will prove an insuperable obstacle in the way of settling the country. ”

“ We can then free some three million hectares now devoted to marginal rice and corn growing to other uses -- to pasture, to aqua-culture and to high value crops. These efforts in agriculture must be matched by equally resolute efforts at agrarian reform. ”

“ In short, if merely the best modes of cultivation, now in use in some parts of Great Britain, were generally extended, and the whole country was brought to a level, in proportion to its natural advantages of soil and situation, by the further accumulation and more equable distribution of capital and skill; the quantity of additional produce would be immense, and would afford the means of subsistence to a very great increase of population. ”

“ Whole sections of the poorest land went almost out of cultivation, the abandoned farms of the New England hills bearing solemn witness to the competing power of western wheat fields. Sheep and cattle raising, as well as wheat and corn production, suffered at least a relative decline. Thousands of farmers cultivating land of the lower grade were forced to go West or were driven to the margin of subsistence. Even the herds that supplied Eastern cities with milk were fed upon grain brought halfway across the continent. ”

“ They not only give a rich return when first subjugated, but, owing to the depth of the soil and the frequency with which they are visited by fertilizing inundations, they yield rich harvests without fertilizing for thousands of years. It is therefore not surprising that we find the peoples who depended upon tillage for subsistence first developed on the great river plains. ”

“ Those who had the making of the settlements and the governing of these new territories did not consider that the diminution of every establishment was the removal of a market, of an effectual demand for land produce; and that, when all the waste lands should be brought into tillage, the whole would deteriorate in fertility, from the want of fallows, Under the prevailing system of agriculture, which afforded the lands no other means of renovation from over-cropping. ”

“ A bushel of wheat will sow a whole field: the produce of that field will sow twenty fields, and produce twenty harvests. Till there are no longer fields to sow, that is, till a country or the earth is exhausted, the means of subsistence will go on increasing in more than a geometrical ratio; will more than double itself in every generation or season, and will more than keep pace with the progress of population ”

“ Those who do not possess the soil contribute their labor; so that it may be truly said that all human subsistence is derived either from labor on one's own land, or from some laborious industry which is paid for either in the produce of the land itself or in that which is exchanged for what the land brings forth. ”

“ But it must not be forgotten that the reclamation of these fertile lands requires the command of some pecuniary resources; and that the farmer or settler who depends on an annual crop for his subsistence should not undertake their cultivation at first. As in the case of mines, the wealth that lies within them is not yielded to mere scratching or prospecting, but requires the use of some capital and trained intelligence to become available. ”

“ The ordinary high-priced, manufactured, acidulated, so-called "complete" commercial fertilizers, in the small amounts that farmers can afford to use, and do use quite generally in the older states, serve in part as soil-stimulants and commonly leave the land poorer year by year; and if the farmers of the great Corn and Wheat Belts are ever to adopt systems of permanent agriculture, it must be done in the near future, or they too will awake to find their lands impoverished beyond self-redemption. ”

“ So long as the vast natural pastures of the earth are not yet so fully occupied as to be consumed more rapidly than they are spontaneously reproduced, a large and constantly increasing stock of subsistence may be collected and preserved, with little other labour than that of guarding the cattle from the attacks of wild beasts, and from the force or wiles of predatory men. ”

“ It is further thought to foster a better agriculture by a more natural return to the soil of elements removed in cropping, the nearer body of population making such return possible. It is also thought to make at once available the natural resources of a country in mines, quarries, water powers, etc., which might otherwise long remain useless. ”

“ The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the destruction of the forest in new countries; for not only does an increasing population demand additional acres to grow the vegetables which feed it and its domestic animals, but the slovenly husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the luxuriance of his first fields, and compels him to remove his household gods to a fresher soil. The extent of cleared ground required for agricultural use depends very much on the number and kinds of the cattle bred. ”

“ The soil, dotted with small peasant proprietors, was formerly well populated in proportion to its natural fertility. The new system of improved agriculture and increased rents demands the greatest net profit with the least possible outlay, and with this object the cultivators are got rid of as being of no further use. ”

“ To bring about the adoption of systems of farming that will restore our depleted Eastern and Southern soils, and that will maintain or increase the productive power of our remaining fertile lands of the Great Central West, where we are now producing half of the total corn crop of the entire world, is not only the most important material problem of the United States; but to bring this about is worthy of, and will require, the best thought of the most influential men of America. Without a prosperous agriculture here there can be no permanent prosperity for our American institutions. ”

“ The diminution in the amount of labor applied to the soil, consequent upon the removal of the laborers from the land, lessened the quantity of food; while the consumption of that food in cities and towns, and the waste of the fertile ingredients which should be restored to the soil, tended to exhaust the land, and led to vast importations of foreign and the manufacture of mineral manures. ”

“ But, so long as the industrial aim, the raising of large crops for the urban market, prevailed, this change could not tend to revive the farming peasantry, whose aim was primarily an independent subsistence, and who lacked the capital needed for agricultural enterprise on industrial lines. ”

“ The transition to the pastoral stage has meant the substitution of an artificial for a natural basis of subsistence, and therewith a change which more than any other one thing has inaugurated the advance from savagery to civilization.108 From the standpoint of economics, the forward stride has consisted in the application of capital in the form of flocks and herds to the task of feeding the wandering horde;109 from the standpoint of alimentation, in the guarantee of a more reliable and generally more nutritious food supply, which enables population to grow more steadily and rapidly ”

“ Although ultimately the problem of production in agriculture will probably be a most serious one, because of influences such as soil-mining, deforestation, and depletion [Pg 49] of soil through erosion, the immediate problems are, rather, the adjustment of production to demand so that the farmer will be on a more equitable income basis with other elements in the population. ”

“ And yet sacred as is the soil and binding as is the farmer's obligation to society, the means for providing the world's food is nevertheless at his mercy.
It is a well-known fact that the soil can readily be depleted of its fertility and thus robbed of its strength by a system of exploitation, commonly referred to as "extensive farming." Too much of our land is being thus exploited. On the other hand the productiveness of the soil may be very greatly improved. ”

“ Settlers would pour off to the West, and drain the juices of the fertile land by cropping it year after year without fallow, without manure, and then, as the land became in a few years exhausted, would have nowhere whither to turn to find the fertilizers which the soil would need. Were they to depend upon agriculture alone, they would sweep in a wave across the land, leaving behind them a worn-out, depopulated, jungle-covered soil, open to future settlement, when its lands should have recovered their fertility, by some other and more provident race. ”

“ It cannot be said, either, that the American farmer studied the philosophy of agriculture. He owed his crops less to intelligent cultivation of the soil than to provident Nature in a new and untilled country. Both his methods and his implements were bad, and resulted in that land spoliation which has been the bane of American industry. "Agriculture in the South," said John Taylor, of Caroline, "does not consist so much in cultivating land as in killing it" ”

“ But if they must manure for a crop of oats, they reckon the crop of natural grass rather more profitable. But the scarcity of bread corn—or rather, indeed, the want of bread—obliges them to pursue the less profitable practice. Oats and bear being necessary for their subsistence, they must prefer them to every other produce. The land at present in tillage, and fit to produce them, is very limited, and inadequate to the consumption of the inhabitants. They are, therefore, obliged to make it yield as much of these grains as possible, by scourging crops. ”

“ On this depends the advantageousness of intensive agriculture (high farming) in every higher stage of civilization. There land is dear and labor cheap. Hence, efforts are made to get along with the least amount of land-surface, and this minimum of land is made more productive by a number of expedients in cultivation, by manuring it, by seed-corn, etc., of course also by the employment of journeymen laborers, oxen, etc. ”

“ This should be noted, however, that, whether the result of the discussions of this Congress or not, the people of the United States have shown an interest in agriculture and the maintenance of soil fertility which they had never shown before. Bankers, railroad officials, capitalists are beginning to see that unless the farmer receives encouragement and efficient aid, this nation will soon cease to be a factor in supplying other nations with food, and will gradually become a consuming [Pg 163] instead of a producing country, so far as the products of the soil are concerned. ”

“ It may be safely said that the land, climate, and industrious population are existent and suitable, but the population is congested, leaving large fertile areas of land untouched. Transport difficulties have up to the present prevented cultivation of products useful for export, and the non-employment of cattle for ploughing has restricted cultivation to the growth of crops entirely absorbed by local necessity. ”