Fig. 4, Chapter 27. Dairy products. Observe the close relation with manufactures in Fig. 3, ch. 26.
§ 6. Conditions favoring diversified farming. There are however, limits to the net advantage of specialization in crops, and competent authorities on agriculture question whether in many cases that limit has not been reached and passed. Most farms have a variety of soils and conditions—hilltops, slopes, bottom-lands—which are suitable for different purposes. A rotation of crops is necessary to get good yields. Live stock must be kept to maintain the fertility of the land, which de teriorates fast if hay and grain are continually sold. Some live stock can be kept on every farm very cheaply with the food that would go to waste otherwise. The specialization in stock-raising in the prairie states ceased to be profitable when lands became more valuable. Specialization in wheat production in the states just west of the Mississippi is possible only as long as wheat will grow on the virgin soil without costly fertilizers. The cotton farmers of the South, especially the negro-farmers, have been forced by debt and thriftlessness into a one-crop policy that is now seen to be wasteful in the long run. A variety of production is necessary to employ labor somewhat regularly on a farm throughout the year.
These and other conditions will make most farming always an industry of comparatively diversified products. Only 1 per cent of the farms get as much as 40 per cent of their receipts from fruit; 2 per cent get that much from tobacco ; 3 per cent from vegetables; 6 per cent from dairy products; and 19 per cent from cotton. The remaining 64 per cent of receipts are in most cases from various sources, and these figures do not include the value of produce consumed by the farmer's family.
§ 7. Intensive farming in Europe and America. No other farm problem interests the city man so much as that of increasing the production of the land. To most city men farming hardly seems to be an occupation giving livelihood and life to the farmer; it seems rather to exist for the sole purpose of feeding men living in cities. The city man, there fore, measures the success of farming, not by the farmer's income or by the level of the countryside prosperity, but by the number of bushels per acre raised to ship to town. Every city newspaper and magazine contains articles pointing to the fact that larger crops per acre are raised in Europe than in America, and broadly suggesting that the American farmer could do as well, if only he would. Foreign travelers com
ment in like vein on the wasteful use of land in America as compared with farming methods in Europe.
Land is used most extensively, with respect to labor, when it is in forests; somewhat less so when in pasture, as care must be given to the live stock; and still less when used for hay, grain, and other crops. But cultivation with machinery in large fields is a far more extensive method of agriculture than that carried on by the patient work of peasants with their hand tools. The more labor or the more equipment (or both together) that is put upon an acre, the larger the product, but the larger the cost per unit. It is a familiar economic principle.' It would bankrupt any farmer, excepting the millionaire amateur, to farm in America, by European methods. American farmers, at least many of them, could raise as many bushels per acre and keep their farms as.thor oughly cultivated as do the European peasants, if wages were as low here as are the peasants' incomes.
§ 8. Prospect of more intensive cultivation of land in America. As the aggregate need for food increases in America there must come a steady pressure upon our stock of land uses, resulting in decreasing returns to labor in ag riculture, unless this movement can be counteracted by the spread of better methods in agriculture—not European peas ant methods, but new American methods consistent with high labor incomes. A good deal of our farm land is un doubtedly too intensively used now in view of present and prospective commodity prices and wages. Maladjustment of land uses has resulted from mistaken judgment, from chang ing conditions as to prices, transportation, and markets, and from loss of soil fertility. There are thus, on nearly every old farm, some fields that would better be in pasture and much hillside pasture that would better be woodland. It is often declared extravagantly that our country could support easily the total population of China, or as great a population per square mile as that of Italy. If it did so it would be only on the penalty of lowering wages toward, if not quite to, the level of the Chinese coolie or of the Italian peasant. Great 2 See Vol. I, chs. 12 and 13, on proportionality and usance.