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By William Allen White

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. R. LEIGH

HEN one is cataloguing the callings of men one says "the business man, and the farmer," neve. "the business man and farmer" or the "business man engaged in farming." In daily speech modern men and women pay unconscious tribute to the ghost of the old order-the order which seemed to decree that the farmer's existence depended upon brawn and not upon brain. This thoughtless slighting of the farmer's vocation-which is made manifest in a score of forms in all

departments of art, and in the conduct of material affairs-seems curious when one pauses to observe how deeply the farmer of to-day is involved in the meshes of commerce. The successful farmer of this generation must be a business man first, and a tiller of the soil afterward. In him must be combined many talents. He must be a capitalist, cautious and crafty; he must be an operator of industrial affairs, daring and resourceful, and he must play labor's part, with patience and humility. He is in busiCopyright, 1897, by Charles Scribner's Sons. All rights reserved.

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ness as certainly as the banker. And henceforth until the order changes, the farmer's success in business will quadrate with the kind and quantity of brains he uses, and with the number of fertile acres under his plough. Out in the West-where until lately land might be secured for the asking-farms of many acres are found. In the Dakotas and in California and in the far northwestern States of the Union, these large farms are devoted almost exclusively to wheat-growing. In the vernacular of the wheat belt, these farms are called "bonanza" farms. The best examples of such farms may be found in the valley of the Red River of the North, where the stream flows through North Dakota. Oddly enough when the river crosses the Canadian border, the bonanza farms are not found in its valleys, and even smaller farms have not been established universally upon the rich soil, as they have been a few score of miles south in Yankeedom. In the valley upon the American side there is not a barren acre. Wheat stretches away from the car-window to the horizon, over a land flat as a floor. The monotonous exactness of the level makes one long for the undulating prairies of the middle west. Yet the very evenness of the plain has a commercial value, and makes the location here of the great wheat-farms possible. For in a rolling country there is waste land- here an "eighty" on a hill-top, there a "forty" in a swamp. But in bonanza farming every

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foot of land must be productive with the expenditure of the least possible amount of human labor upon it. In the lexicon of the Dakota farmer there is no such word as "hoe."

The smallest implement upon a big wheat farm is a plough. And from the plough to the elevator-from the first operation in wheat-farming to the last one is forced to realize how the spirit of the age has made itself felt here, and has reduced the amount of human labor to the minimum. The man who ploughs uses his muscle only incidentally in guiding the machine. The man who operates the harrow has half a dozen levers to lighten his labor. The "sower who goeth forth to sow," walks leisurely behind a drill and works brakes. The reaper needs a quick brain and a quick hand-but not necessarily a strong arm, nor a powerful back. He works sitting down. The threshers are merely assistants to a machine, and the men who heave the wheat into the bins only press buttons. The most desirable farmhand is not the fellow who can pound the "mauling machine" most lustily at the county fair. He is the man with the cunning brain who can get the most work out of a machine without breaking it. The farm laborer in the West to-day, where machinery is employed, finds himself advanced to the ranks of skilled labor, and enjoys a position not widely different from that of the mill-hand in the East. Each is a tender of a machine.

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This much concerning the industrial side of Western farm life seems to be a necessary introduction to the elaboration of the scheme under which the financial business of the great wheat-growing plantation is conducted. From this brief explanation it may be seen that the problem which confronts the business man entering upon the extensive production of wheat is not entirely different from that which confronts him in any considerable producing enterprise.

In the wheat-farm the investor has the use of labor-saving machinery to increase the output of his establishment; his profits are large or small according to the caprices of his market. Here the parallel between the manufacturer and the bonanza farmer ends, for the farmer must produce to the full capacity every year. And he cannot estimate with much accuracy what his cost of production is going to be at any season. The rain, the hail, or the drought may cut his crop short fifty per cent. within a fortnight of the harvest. The weather, as an element of expense, finds a more important place in the ledger of the big wheat farm than is accorded to it in the books of any industrial enterprise. It happens that in the valley of the Red River of the North the weather during any given month is about the same year after year. This also is true of California. For that reason prob

* Two furrows are made by each plough. There are

twenty or thirty ploughs in a gang, each drawn by five

horses. They travel an average of twenty miles a day. An overseer follows every gang.

ably, more than for any other, capital has been bold enough to venture out of its beaten path to those favored regions. It may interest the reader to know that the season last past has been an exceptional one in the Dakotas, and that hundreds of thousands of acres of wheat in the bonanza country were damaged by rains just before harvest-time. But usually the rains are sent to these fields with beneficent timeli

ness.

The big farms have been operating in the Red River Valley for twenty years. The history of their early development has little economic or sociological interest. They did not grow as a snowball grows, by accumulation, the big farms swallowing up the little ones. The land came to its present owners generally by direct purchase from the railroad corporations. It became the property of the railroads through government grants-a bonus for the construction and operation of the line. The railroad people interested capitalists, and the establishment of the farms came naturally. The "wheat-kings" purchased their land at low prices. The improvements that have been made upon it-after the first breaking, have consisted largely of machinery. Only a small per cent. of the land is under fence, and the houses upon a farm are not at all expensive. Yet as the land of the nation has become occupied in the last quarter of a century, the price of land has increased. This rise of land values has put

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a price upon the acres of the big farms which has tempted many a bonanza farmer to reduce his acreage. Hence one finds the large farms gradually crumbling. In another generation, if land continues to rise in the market, the big farmers may follow the "troubadours and the mound-builders." At present land in the Red River Valley is worth twenty-five dollars an acre. The improvements upon a first-class bonanza farm are worth about five dollars an acre. The average bonanza farmer operates from three to ten thousand acres. There are, of course, scores of small farmers who have one, two, and three sections under plough. They are not counted in the same breath with the more extensive wheat-growers. And it is with these latter

only that there will

be any concern in this paper, for they work upon a system of their own. It is difficult to present the idea of the bigness of these farms to the person whose preconceived notion of a farm is a little checker-board ly

ing upon a hillside or in a valley. Seven thousand acres present the average bonanza farm. Generally these tracts are not divided. Yet distances across fields are so great that horseback communication is im

practicable. Crews of workmen living at one end of the farm and operating it may not see the crews in other corners from season's end to season's end. And in busy seasons it is found profitable to feed the hands in the fields rather than to allow them to trudge through the hot sun to the dininghalls for dinner. The dining-halls—it will be explained later-are scattered over the farm at convenient points. They are frequently five or six miles apart, and many a noon finds the harvesting crew two miles from its hall. This illustration may give one some sort of a rough conception of the bigness of these farms. Here is another point of view: Averaging twenty bushels to the acre-as many farms will this year-the total number of bushels in a crop on a bonanza farm would be 140,000; putting five hundred bushels of that crop in a freight-car, and allowing forty feet to the car, the train which would

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haul the crop from the farm would be two miles long, and if it were to come charging down Fifth Avenue and Broadway in New York, the rear end " brakeman would be craning his neck from the caboose to catch sight of the Vanderbilt mansion while the engineer and fireman were enjoying themselves bumping the cable-car down by Union Square.

And this trainload would be the product of but one farm. The money

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