yet; but they have done better. By skillful
cross-breeding, they have raised the efficiency of the sugar beet from 7%
to 15% sugar. They have produced hardy, seedless oranges, plums, apples,
and strawberry plants which will stand the climate of the frozen north.
They have developed fine, long-stapled cotton, high-yielding cereal
grains, and mammoth carnations and chrysanthemums. They have produced the
wonderberry, the Wealthy Apple and the Burbank Potato. They have developed
flax with 25% more seed. And the "Minnesota Number Thirteen Corn," so
hardy and sure, has carried the cornbelt in three great states fully fifty
miles further to the north, with its magnificent wake of golden profits.
No wonder America feeds the world. Such is our splendid Yankee genius for
efficiency. It is the master-spirit, the ruling genius of our age; and it
shows itself best on our fields and prairies. Other nations compete fairly
well with our manufactures. They outstrip us in commerce. But they are
hopelessly behind our American agriculture. The farm products of this
country amounted in the year 1910 to almost nine billion dollars. The corn
crop alone was worth a billion and a half; enough to cancel the entire
interest-bearing debt of the United States, buy all of the gold and silver
mined in all the countries of the earth in 1909, and still leave the
farmers pocket-money.[21]

_The Natural Conservatism of Farmers_

In all fairness it must be said, the modern gospel of progressiveness has
not been everywhere accepted, far from it. Plenty of farmers, doubtless
the majority, are still following the old traditions. Country folks as a
rule are conservative. They like the old ways and are suspicious of
"new-fangled notions." Director Bailey of Cornell enjoys telling the
comment he overheard one day from a farmer of this sort. It was after he
had been speaking at a rural life conference, doubtless proposing various
plans for better farming, which differed from the honored superstitions of
the neighborhood. A stolid native was overheard saying to his neighbor,
"John, let them blow! They can't hurt me none." He prided himself on being
immune to all appeals at such a rural life revival.

Such a man is very common among the hills, and wherever the soil is poor;
but he is beginning to feel lonesome in really prosperous rural
communities, for the new agriculture is fast winning its way. That is, the
application of science to agriculture has proved it