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About Will Maupin's weekly. (Lincoln, Neb.) 1911-1912 | View Entire Issue (Feb. 24, 1911)
THE WORLD FACING STARVATION? "Starvation is staring the world in the face-!" We have heard that doleful cry often during the last decade; especially since a certain railroad builder and, incidentally, land sales promoter1 began insisting that human hunger was growing faster than food production. . Taking up" his cry, 'the statisticians and fictionists hive been har rying and frightening us with what they declared is absolute proof of the truth of : the railroad builder's cry. Yet there are ,;; those of us who refuse to grow 'pale of f cheek or tremulous of speech when we lis- '' ten to the direful predictions of ultimate world starvation. Somehow or- other the -most of us manage to get our three square meals a day, usually by working, although some there be who get theirs in divers and sundry ways not recognized in law as being good form. We are told that our area of corn pro duction is already stretched to the limit; and we are shown by figures that our wheat production is decreasing owing to the over working of our wheat lands. By deft ma nipulation of the multiplier under the multi plicand we are shown that at the decreasing rate of production and the increasing rate of population we are all too soon to begin skipping meals with constantly increasing regularity. A great many people have been worried to death by troubles that never hap pened ; and a lot of people are working up cases of starvation while surrounded by" foodstuffs of every description, and with '. multiplying facilities or increasing the pro duction thereof. It is true. that there are thousands upon thousands- aye, millions upon millions of people 'who are ih dire want. Many of them, however, want that which they do not need but think they need ; other millions are really in .need because they lack the "getrup-and-get" spirit in prop er degree ; still other -thousands are starv- -. ing because of some radical failure in our complex machinery of distribution. Less than twenty years ago Nebraska, farmers were burning corn for . fuel because it was so cheap it was unprofitable to haul it to market. At the same time miners in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, with mil- ' lions of tons of coal waiting for their picks and shovels, were starving because they could not mine that coal and send it to those Nebraska farmers in exchange for the foodstuff those farmers were burning. Even- . as long ago as that an occasional pessimist would arise and assert that the world was approaching the starvation stage. But the blunt fact is that the world is further away . than ever from that point. One need but -look past academic figures to -where the rerl facts are to obtain proof of the truth of that assertion. A great many people overlook the trite old truth that while "figures will not He,- liars will figure," and- these, gazing first upon the tables showing decreasing .wheat yields per acre, and then at the tables show ing rapidly increasing' population, immedi ately feel hunger pinching them. Of course it is true that we usually con sume every year what was produced in that year, and that if the 1911 crops were to utterly fail we would all become awfully hungry. before the 1912 crops were harvest ed. It is also true that if one-half the peo ple were to die during 1911 the under takers could not . supply enough coffins to decently inter the dead. This old world has been' wagging along for several , thou sands of years, and to date we have al ways nianaged to raise enough foodstuffs every year to feed the vast majority until another crop came along. True that many people have died of famine, but was it. be cause there was not enough food in the world, or was -it because, we have signally .failed, as yet, to solve the problem of dis tributing. our food supplies? The fault" has been our own' if our. brothers 'and sisters anywhere starved to death, not the fault of the., soil, the air,- the water or the Creator. While a lot of pessimistic statisticians are growing blue about the gills because they have figured out that the day of ulti mate starvation, is at . hand, . proving it to their, own satisfaction by tables showing de- ' creasing production per acre, a lot of op timistic scientific sharps, usually working for scant wage but with unbounded en thusiasm, are finding ways to correct that. When Uncle Sam had land to give away to all comers, and gave it, the land was held so cheaply that people abused it, over looking the. fact that soil; like a cistern,, must at some time jor other have some thing put into it else the time would come when it would have nothing to give out. After raising successive crops of corn or, wheat upon land, until the land balked and refused to yield profitably, the farmer moved on, or sold out to some .otherfarmer whose ... land was in even poorer condition. . Right , here the "book farmer," the .sci entific fellow in the college laboratory, came - to the front with his theory about crop rota- tion? legumes, t bugs and other things, all evolved from his inner consciousness, so to speak, and after the "practical farmers", had laughed at him for a spell his theories were . taken up little by little. As a result, land that was pronounced "worked out" and worthless a generation ago, is now produc . ing. bigger, crops than it did in its palmiest dayvs of yore. We have so long labored under the delu sion that it took not less than 160 acres of ' fertile land to afford a living that we find it difficult to believe that a 40, or even a 20-acre farmv well tilled and intensively cul tivated is more profitable than the quarter section merely "farmed." Yet it is the truth, as. may be seen by a visit to Pawnee county, Nebraska, where lives the most suc cessful farmer in the United, States. He' is actually getting rich from the production of a 20-acre; farm. Land,, too, that he. bought v cheaply because the man he bought it from thought it practically worthless, being hilly and clayey. That successful farmer not only uses plow and harrow and disc and hoe, but he uses brains and, after all, the best farm, tool and the best fertilizer is brains. When Nebraska was admitted to state hood in 1867 her population consisted of . about 100,000 people, nine-tenths, of whom lived fifty or sixty miles of the Missouri river. For fifteen years people believed that ful pictures of impending starvation, sixteen million acres of fertile Nebraska soil are ready for alfalfa seed soil never yet touched' by the plow. Starvation staring the world in the face? Just about as true as the old-time Millerite predictions of the second coming. The prob lem of production is really solved. If in ability to nroduce is all that is fri.p-hten- - .-?.. ing the pessimists, let them 'chirp '"up.,v The' problem confronting us now is how to "get what we can produce to those who need it, and get it to them in time. , The starvation-scared statisticians dearby love to deal in. doleful figures ; perhaps some figures, the other way" 'round may tend to ease their minds. Nebraska has 72,000 square miles pf land within, her borders, four-fifths of which, approximately 58,000 square miles, is unusually responsive to intelligent culti vation. That is 37,120,000 acres, or there abouts. : JNlowj it that Pawnee county farmer, who has a wife and three children, can make a good living and lay Up a thousand dollars or so a year on 20 acres what's the an swer? Nebraska has a population of about i nwnAnn 1 1 r r t i; x TM - i,iv,uuu, na.ii ui wiiuin live in tuvviis. J. lie same figures that the hunger-scared statisti cians use to frighten the unthinking, prove that Nebraska can take care of about 5,500,- 000 more people on . her fertile lands, and about as many more in her cities and towns. And taking care of 11,000,000 people threat- PtiPiH ixrirh croi-Trntirm 10 to L-ino- iir mi. to o . considerable bit of slack at least for one state that was deemed little if any better than a desert less than a generation ago. TM - j - C . 1 . j ' I nprp arp rnr rnanv ni rnpep arric ini7fvs- . tigators, and too few investigators who get out. and pace off the ground. Why, if every corn raiser in the United States went right on trying to raise corn like their grand- .' - J !j .1 J.J. t 1. iatners raised ir, we woman t nave enougn corn in anv one vear to make a eriddlecake "j ... t r i per capira. r oriunateiy ior au 01 us in our agricultural school laboratories .are men I who would have difficulty in explaining to a Wall street broker the difference between a fancmlnw and a rr patn senaratnr hut whn o or 1 j " " arc discovering new things about corn and corn growing every day,, and then telling bright-faced students all about them. Then those students hike joyfully back to the farms and make 'steen ears of corn where only a nubbin grew before. Same way with wlipat an A nats arA rr1-n tnpc t-rpr-ri-Vi inor produced from the soil. Danger of the world starving? Yes, when there is no longer air to breathe or water to slake thirst. Scarcity of hogs and cattle and other meat r.rnr.iirts ? CVrtainlv hnt th rpcnii rnafnl west is full of swine and kine potentiali ties. A score of years ago it took a half section of. land to raise a long-horned steer that was scarcelv worth the raising- after oil Tr'o AiCCni- AUln..n.Ul.l.. .1 max. . -1 fc. VJ.XI1 V-X Vll t 11V VV J. 1.1.1,1 1J Ugil CLA most. unbounded cattle range is a thing of 1 1 a j 1 ir . . 1 ta t ine past, mere are more Deei came in in e braska todav than in the. davs of the frpe range. Not long-horns, either; the white- lace, the short-horn, the foiled Angus, the Aberdeens the best beef animals in the world, any one of which is worth more than three of the long-hbrns that once roamed . the free and unfenced range. And on the half-section that once had all it could do v to' prepare one of those Texans for market,' a carload of grade steers is now prepared, yet men sit around with faces as long as- TMimrvhfinrl1ac -f-llinfr 11c h'o-. -fVn A -it - . vation is almost upon us! If there is hun ger anywhere in this world and of course there is it is not because we are unable tot produce the foodstuffs to satify that hunger, It is because there is. somewhere, a badJdnk