s our American
farmers, it is gratifying to see, are at last waking up to the
disgraceful folly of using cottonseed meal as a crop-producer without
first getting its other value as a meat-producer.

I find out, furthermore, that what old Maury's Geography led me to
believe was a vast Desert of Gobi here in North China or Mongolia
alongside Manchuria is not a genuine desert at all, but chiefly a
great grass plain with golden possibilities as a cattle country. Mr.
Parker declares that if cattle were grown on these immense ranges and
brought to Manchuria in the fall to be fattened off on bean cake,
millet, etc., Harbin, Chang-chun, Mukden, and other Manchurian cities
might soon build packing plants that would rival Chicago's in bigness.
This system of stock-raising would also solve the problem of
maintaining soil fertility, just as it would bring relief to those
sections of America where the policy of selling everything off the
land and putting nothing back threatens disaster.

The old ridge system of growing crops, the rows thrown up as high as
the little plows will permit and the crops planted on top, is the
general practice here, and Mr. Parker is making an effort through the
experiment farm to convince the people of the advantages of level
cultivation. He also wishes to introduce better plows. "The truth is,"
he says, "that we never had any real plows until James Oliver and John
Deere invented theirs. All the plowing before that was merely
scratch-work, and here in Manchuria the plows are hardly better than
those the Egyptians used. But for the extremely light, ash-like,
wind-drift soil the people with such crude tools could hardly make
enough to subsist on."

In Korea I noticed some moderately fair cotton fields, and in
Manchuria I have also found a few patches, though the climate here is
obviously too cold for its profitable production. I find that the
Japanese have great faith in the future of the industry in Korea.

This notice of Manchurian farming would not be complete {77} without
some mention of the queer aspect of many of the cultivated fields--
thick-dotted with earth mounds, around which the rows are curved and
twisted, these mounds resembling medium-sized potato hills. They
contain not vegetables, however, but bones. Each cone-shaped mound is
a Chinaman's grave. I first noticed this method of burying in Korea,
but the mounds are quite low there--all that I saw, at least, except
the Queen's Tomb at Seou