The Culture of vast quantities of wheat are raised by all-around farmers, as in France and Illinois, there are few crops in which the one-crop system is more widely prevalent. In the United States and Canada this type of agriculture is a temporary phase because the people are intelligent enough to see that though it is highly profitable on virgin land, it does not pay permanently. The same will also probably be the case in Australia and Argentina, where wheat is practically the only crop in vast areas. In more backward regions such as Algeria, southern Italy, southern Russia, northern India, and much of western Asia the one-crop, extensive system of wheat-rais ing has become almost permanent. This is partly because of scarcity of rain at some seasons, especially in summer, and also because of frequent droughts. These conditions prevent the growth of many crops and keep, the people poor. Moreover, many of the one-crop farmers lack energy and initiative.
In the United States, Canada, and Argentina the one-crop system of wheat raising has been steadily pushed westward. Formerly the knowledge that there was plenty of new land made the American wheat farmer careless of how he exhausted the soil, just as the Russian farmer was made careless by the knowledge that owing to his communal system of holding lands the tract that he cultivated might next yew be assigned to someone else and he would reap no benefit from improv ments. So the frontier wheat farmer scattered the seed over scor of acres and left it to the care of nature—the most extensive of a kinds of farming. Even now this system still persists somewhat i the Dakotas, Washington, and Alberta. But wheat exhausts the s about twice as rapidly as cotton, and the growth of population makes the land more valuable for other types of farming. Hence, the one crop wheat system rarely endures permanently among progressive people.
The one-crop frontier wheat farming of the United States and Canada has occasioned some unique developments in machinery. Such huge farms with a single short period of sowing and again of harvesting are confronted by a very serious labor problem, especially as they are located in regions of sparse settlement. At harvest time the farmers must depend largely on itinerant labor attracted from regions farther east by high wages. Men temporarily out of work in the vil lages and cities, college students, and sons of the corn-belt farmers who have completed the summer work on their own farms travel to the wheat fields when the grain is ripe. Nevertheless, there is often
a serious shortage of labor, and the wheat farmer is rarely sure of getting all the men he needs. This has led to the invention of improved machinery such as gang plows, huge reapers, and twine binders. Thus the amount of human labor needed in raising one bushel of wheat has been reduced from three hours in 1830 to ten minutes today. In spite of this, the need for labor is still great, as may be judged from the fact that in 1921, when many men were idle in the East, the Western farm ers of the United States and Canada were clamoring for help. The United States Department of Labor carried fifty or sixty thousand men to the grain fields but they were not nearly enough.
one-fifth of the wheat in the United States is raised on small arms of less than one hundred acres. On such farms the great machines are too expensive unless the farmers learn the lesson of the dairymen and cooperate in owning them. As the big one-crop farms give place to all-around, diversified farming, commercial fertilizers are introduced, crops are rotated, leguminous crops like clover are planted every few years and plowed under to provide nitrogen, and the numbr of stalks to each plant is increased by tillering or partly covering the young plants with soil. The government cooperates with the farmers in fighting the Hessian fly, and in finding varieties of wheat adapted to all sorts of climate and soil as the Durum variety is adapted to semi-arid regions. In all these ways the wheat farmer is changing his methods so that not only is the yield of wheat per acre increasing, but wheat becomes merely the cash crop, while the. farmer's food supply comes from other crops.
In backward countries where the one-crop system has become firmly established, it leads to many difficulties and much hardship. For instance, in southern Russia many famines, including those of 1891, 1898, and 1921, have been clue to deficient rains at critical periods and consequent failure of the wheat crop. If other crops could be raised, whose critical periods came at different times, the chances of famine would be much diminished and the prosperity and civilization of the affected regions would be raised. Unfortunately for such countries as Algeria, Turkey, and northern India the rains come only at limited seasons, a fact which makes it hard to find many crops that will thrive and thus tends greatly to establish the one-crop system of agriculture.