Jasper County Democrat, Volume 23, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 June 1920 — How Would You Like to Harvest Two Crops of Corn a Year as They Do in the Philippines? [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

How Would You Like to Harvest Two Crops of Corn a Year as They Do in the Philippines?

No, reader, this corn was not grown by one of our local farmers! It wasn’t grown in the United States, even. It was grown in the faroff Philippine Islands by Filipino schoolboys. Two fine crops of corn a year are produced in the Islands. The Philippines are doing some wonderful things in the agricultural line. The Philippine government has fine agricultural schools throughout the islands, and the Philippine legislature, composed entirely of Filipinos, is each year making larger and larger appropriations for this important work. The staple food of the islands is rice, but corn is coming right along in popular favor. Its use was given great impetus in the last year because of a rice

shortage. Other important Philippine crops are hemp, sugar cane, cocoanuts, coffee, tapioca and pineapples. Lumber is also an important industry. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of land lying idle in the Philippines, which have a greater area of fertile land than Japan —this in spite of the fact that the population of the Philippines is 11,000,000 while that of Japan is around 55,000,000. There laevery reason to believe that some day the Philippines will have a population as large as that of Japan today. The Filipinos are the only Christian people in the orient, and their young men are • working night and day to prepare themselves for the responsibility of citizenship in the Philippine Republic,, which they believe to be near at hand.