Items of Interest September 19, 1914 Issue

Items of Interest

If Brazil were to engage more extensively in the cultivation of cotton and rice, this step would help materially to solve its economic questions, according to investigators who have been busy with the subject for months. Cotton is grown almost entirely in the eastern states. Ordinarily very primitive means of planting and working the cotton crop are employed by the farmers, who have only small holdings. As rice is one of the important articles of food in Brazil, it became an essential matter to encourage home production, and toward that end a high protective duty was imposed on importations. Rice growing has increased so that it supplies a considerable part of the home demand. It is raised mostly on a strip of land fifty to seventy-five miles wide along the coast, and also to a certain extent along the rivers. The annual production amounts to about eighty thousand tons, and in a recent year some sixteen thousand tons additional were imported, chiefly from India.

Five million acres of government land in the western provinces of Canada, now being surveyed by the department of the interior, will be opened for homesteading purposes in a short time. This work is being done in widely separated districts, from northern Manitoba to the valleys of British Columbia. The chief scene of activity in the province of Alberta is in the Peace river district, north of Edmonton, where forty-five townships are being subdivided into quarter sections of one hundred and sixty acres each. This will provide sixty-four hundred homesteads, or a block of land more than forty miles square. In "the Peace river block," a tract of three million five hundred thousand acres, surveys are being made in the vicinity of Fort St. John and Hudson's Hope, six hundred miles by road from Edmonton. This land was conveyed to the dominion by the province of British Columbia.

Plans have been formulated by the General Federation of Women's Clubs for beautifying the Lincoln highway by planting trees, shrubs, and flowers along its course from ocean to ocean. This important piece of work will be accomplished by the Lincoln way tree committee, which will consist of the chairman of conservation of the Federation of Women's Clubs of thirteen states through which this highway passes. They will be assisted by the women's clubs throughout the respective states in the planting of the trees. It is estimated that it will cost twenty-five million dollars to accomplish this work, several millions of which have been promised.

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