for catching and holding the meaning of the spell which this land casts over mind and heart. All that one may hope to do is to flash his feeble light upon some of the high points.
We're an emotional people, but we have our practical side. So has this story. Let's try to consider, as soberly as we can, some of the practical features of Willamette valley life. We can't go carefully into detail in a few pages; we'll have to look at our facts rather in the mass.
The best blood of America pioneered this country of the Willamette, making the first really permanent settlements something more than sixty years ago. Wheat-growing was the chief concern of those pioneer farmers, and wheat-growing held first place for a long time, to the exclusion of almost everything else. The land holdings were large in those days, and the production of wheat was carried on according to the old methods of extensive farming—wheat, wheat, wheat, year after year. Wheat was just about the only farm product that figured then in shipments out of the valley. Several lines of steamboats brought down the wheat from the farms to Portland, and carried back most of what the wheat farmers ate and used. Life then was slow and easy-going. Modern ideas of farming and farm management hadn't yet caught hold.
That couldn't last, though. Soils, climate, location and every other circumstance made this an ideal place for modern diversified farming in its best form. Wheat farming had to give way before it. That's been the history of every one-crop district. The production of a single crop over a wide area, to the exclusion of others, is unsound in theory, tremendously wasteful in practice. "Bonanza farming" sounds mighty fine and large and princely. Fortunes have been made at it—by the favored few; but that sort of farming has always spelled industrial and social stagnation for the region indulging it. Exclusive cotton—growing has kept the farm life of the southern Gulf States at a standstill for generations. While the states of the Upper Mississippi valley were devoted exclusively to growing and selling grain. life there was hardly worth living. So long as the Plains country was abandoned entirely to stock grazing. there was no social life worth mentioning. That's inevitably true everywhere. High civilization always waits on the development of many and various resources. Bonanza money-making is only part of life, as we're beginning to understand it. Mind you, this isn't said in disparagement of the earlier farmers. Theirs was a necessary first step; but it was only the toddling first step of an industrial infant just beginning to walk. Naturally, later steps have been firmer, surer. It was these later steps that really enabled the Willamette valley to "get there."
A simple list of present-day products of this valley soil would fill pages. At a recent county fair, one farmer alone exhibited 267 varieties of products grown on his own farm. Conditions here enable the production of all temperate zone foodstuffs at the lowest possible cost and of the highest quality.
It's only within the last ten years that diversified farming really got upon its feet in this valley. Let's not try now to forecast what it will accomplish in the future; let's look instead at what has been already actually accomplished. That's the best part of the story, right now.
This valley, with its 5,000,000 acres of cultivable land, now has only about 1,000,000 acres actually under cultivation, with about 250,000 acres more in use as pasture and meadow. The valley holds 22,000 farm homes, with about two-thirds of the people of the valley living on the farms and in the small farm villages. Hardly one acre has yet been brought up to its full producing power. That work is still in its first stages.
But mark this, in contrast to the old wheat-growing days: this valley is now feeding its 200,000 people in abundance, and is marketing besides, every year, food-stuffs of the value of $42,500,000. That's an annual cash income of $42.50 per acre on the cultivated land. That's an annual cash income of $212.50 for every man, woman and child in the valley, from farm products alone. That's an annual cash income of $1033.80 for every farm of the 22.000 farms of the valley. And mind: those figures represent surplus remaining after the people of the valley have used what they need for themselves. We're used to thinking of the Mississippi valley as one of the world's garden spots, vastly rich and prosperous; but please note this comparison:
Taking the five richest farming states of the Mississippi valley—Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois and Iowa—there's an
