in the vegetable garden and the truck patch by reason of a lack of facilities for taking care of the surplus, will readily understand what a saving there could be if a cold-storage plant were convenient. Gradually these plants are coming closer and closer to the farmer, many of whom already are making use of them to store their perishable products, like fruits, vegetables, and eggs, until the higher prices of the winter months set in.

THE FISH SUPPLY

As the world fills up with people, the more humanity is bound to look to the sea for food, and a rich field will there be found. Already the United States has a fisheries industry the value of whose product nearly offsets the value of the product of its wonderful apple orchards. Our fisheries yield a return of $70,000,000 a year, which almost exactly duplicates the returns the United Kingdom receives from her fishing industry. France's annual catch reaches a value of $33,000,000, while that of Russia amounts to $50,000,000. Austria - Hungary and Germany together have a total catch of only $12,000,000 value (see pages 26-27).

It has been conservatively estimated that the world's fish supply exceeds twenty billion pounds. Japan's fisheries produce about six billion pounds a year. What our western grazing lands have been to our meat supply, that has the sea been to Japan's.

A census of the sea would reveal more animal life to the square mile, perhaps, than the land itself possesses. There are all sorts and shapes and varieties of aquatic life to be found, and the rich treasures of food which the rivers of the earth carry down to the oceans defy

Gradually new fishing grounds are being opened up and new varieties of fish introduced to the public. Just now the efforts of the United States Bureau of Fisheries to restore the tile-fish to the American dinner table, and its plans for a campaign of education in favor of the edibility of the dogfish, are straws which show the direction of the wind in the utilization of the vast food treasures of the sea.

CHINESE GREAT FISH EATERS

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The Chinese are among the greatest fish eaters of the world, and they have accepted so many varieties in their list of edible fishes that they can have a different kind for breakfast every morning in the year. Not only are their seas filled with fish, but their rivers as well, and while no other nation has gone as far as the United States in scientific fish propagation in fresh waters, the Chinese have cared for their fish supply through a hundred generations.

All sorts of methods for catching fish have been developed by the nations of the earth. It is a far cry from the big steam trawler of the North Sea to the hook and line of the small boy on a country creek bank. But most picturesque of all the ways of fishing in the world is that resorted to by the Chinese-fishing with cormorants. The cormorants are hatched under chicken hens, and when about three months old are taught to fish.

The trainer ties a string to one of the bird's legs and drives it into the water. He then throws out some small fish which the bird promptly catches. It is taught to dive and come back at the call of a whistle. When trained, collars are put about the bird's neck, so that it cannot swallow the fish it catches. A fisherman goes out with the rail of his boat lined with string-hitched cormorants. At a given signal they dive, and the fish that can outswim them under water is as rare as a small fish in an angler's description of his catch.

THE CEREAL CROPS

That the vegetable kingdom has more to offer the world's market basket than the animal world is revealed by a comparison of the animal products and the vegetable products of the food factories of the United States-the greatest animal-food producing country on the globe.

Although a smaller portion of the vegetable products of the country passed through factory processes than of the meat products, the vegetable manufacturing processes employed, at the last census. 292.000 people and turned out a product valued at $2,237,000,000, while

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the animal product factories employed 119,000 people and yielded an output valued at $1,700,000,000.

The total products of the farms of the United States that year amounted to more than all the gold mines of the world have yielded in six centuries (see page 32).

BUMPER CROPS AND PRICES

The world's normal yield of the six great cereal crops-oats, wheat, corn, rye, barley, and rice-ranges between sixteen billion and nineteen billion bushels, and statistics show that the farmer gets less ordinarily for his big crop than he receives for his small one.

Excluding rice, we find that the 1911 cereal crop amounted to 13,786,000,000 bushels. The average value per bushel, based on the average farm price for the United States on December 1, was 72.9 cents, giving a total crop value of $10,030,000,000. The crop of 1912 was the bumper crop of the world's history, reaching a total of 16,115,000,000 bushels. The average farm price on December 1, 1912, in the United States, was 54.7 cents per bushel, showing a world crop value of $9,814,000,000.

In other words, the farmers of the world handled 2,329,000,000 bushels more of grain in 1912 than in 1911, and yet they got $1,216,000,000 less for the big crop than for the small one.

The same condition is shown in a comparison of the statistics for 1906 and 1907. Although the world's farmers produced three-quarters of a billion bushels of grain less in the latter year than in the former, they received nearly two billion dollars less for the large crop of 1906 than for the small one of 1907.

THE WORLD'S WHEAT CROP Though man shall not live by bread alone, western civilization would find it very difficult to get along without wheat and its products. Although the wheat plant is not of western origin, it has become mainly a western product, marching hand in hand with western civilization. The world's total production of wheat approximates 4,000,000,000 bushels a year. It would take 4,000,000 of

the largest freight cars, making a train reaching more than one and one-half times around the earth, to move this great annual yield. Moving at twenty miles an hour, this train would take thirty-odd days to pass a given point.

The wheat crop of the United States is approximately one-fifth of that of the entire world. It would seem that with the development of the northwestern part of this country, wheat had at last reached its limit of cultivation on American soil; but those who have studied the question most closely tell us that the wheat-growing industry has heretofore simply followed the lines of least resistance, picking out here and there the lands best suited for wheat growing; and that since all the choicest land has been opened up, the wheat growers will gradually drift back and take up the less available lands that they passed over in looking for the best (see page 34).

Not only will the trend of the wheat field be east and south, but it is certain to reach farther and farther into what is now the semi-arid regions of the West. Between its extension into the desert through irrigation and its advance into the semi-desert through the introduction of hardy, drought - resisting varieties, America is afar off from the time when the potential acreage and yield of her wheat fields is reached.

It is estimated that it will be easily possible for the United States to double its

wheat-growing area. That would give us an average which, when we approximate western European standards in wheat growing, will yield very nearly as much wheat as the whole world produces today.

It has been strikingly said that he who can add a grain of wheat to each head in the world's wheat fields can give bread to millions of people, and when the United States extends her acreage to its maximum and develops the yield to its limit, nations yet unborn can rise up and secure bread from her flour bins.

RUSSIA'S WHEAT FIELDS

But as full of possibilities as the wheatgrowing industry of the United States may be, they are few in comparison with

those of Russia. That wonderful country, possessing more latent agricultural resources, perhaps, than any like area in the world, has 288,000,000 acres of excellent wheat land. Even at our present standard of production, which is less than half of that of western Europe, Russia alone could produce more wheat than is raised on the entire globe today.

As matters now stand, the Russian crop is only about ten bushels per acre. That her lands are as fertile and her climate as well suited to the growing of

wheat as those of England and Germany are facts well known to all those who have considered her relation to the world's future food problems. Even today, in spite of her small per-acre production of every principal crop, Russia is the greatest exporter of grain in the world.

We ordinarily think of the exportation and importation of food products as being one of the most important considerations in relation to production. The world's prices for these commodities are