primarily to rice culture. A conservative estimate would place the
miles of canals in China at fully 200,000 and there are probably
more miles of canal in China, Korea and Japan than there are miles
of railroad in the United States. China alone has as many acres in
rice each year as the United States has in wheat and her annual
product is more than double and probably threefold our annual wheat
crop, and yet the whole of the rice area produces at least one and
sometimes two other crops each year.

The selection of the quick-maturing, drought-resisting millets as
the great staple food crops to be grown wherever water is not
available for irrigation, and the almost universal planting in hills
or drills, permitting intertillage, thus adopting centuries ago the
utilization of earth mulches in conserving soil moisture, has
enabled these people to secure maximum returns in seasons of drought
and where the rainfall is small. The millets thrive in the hot
summer climates; they survive when the available soil moisture is
reduced to a low limit, and they grow vigorously when the heavy
rains come. Thus we find in the Far East, with more rainfall and a
better distribution of it than occurs in the United States, and with
warmer, longer seasons, that these people have with rare wisdom
combined both irrigation and dry farming methods to an extent and
with an intensity far beyond anything our people have ever dreamed,
in order that they might maintain their dense populations.

Notwithstanding the fact that in each of these countries the soils
are naturally more than ordinarily deep, inherently fertile and
enduring, judicious and rational methods of fertilization are
everywhere practiced; but not until recent years, and only in Japan,
have mineral commercial fertilizers been used. For centuries,