§ 1. Sources of food and organic materials. § 2. Agriculture and farms in the United States. § 3. Rural and agricultural. § 4. Lack of a social agricultural policy in America. § 5. Period of decaying agricultural prosperity. § 6. Sociological effects of agricultural decay. § 7. Fewer, relatively, occupied in agriculture; use of machinery. § 8. Transfer of work from farm to factory. § 9. The rural exodus. § 10. The fanner's income in monetary terms. § 11. Compensations of the farmer's life. § 12. Ownership and tenancy.

§ 1. Sources of food and organic materials. The land area of the United States is about 1,900,000,000 acres, of which 879,000,000 acres were in farms in 1910, this being 46 per cent of the total area. A very small part of the re-mainder is used for residential and commercial purposes, the rest being barren mountains, deserts, swamps, and forests. Of the total in farms a little more than one half was improved, 478,000,000 acres altogether, a per capita average of 5.2 acres; and a little less than one half was unimproved, 400,000,000 acres altogether, a per capita average of 4.3 acres. The improved land produced not merely food but many kinds of materials, such as cotton, wool, hides, and lumber, while much of the unimproved land was either in farm wood-lots or in rough range pasture. Of course, the kinds and amounts of produce per acre vary with the climate, particularly with sunshine and rainfall; possibly the proportion of the area of the United States that is true desert and infertile mountain-land is greater than that of any other equal area in the temperate zones. The actual productive capacity per acre of the lands of America cannot be expressed in a very helpful way as a general average per acre, but each area must be carefully studied in respect to its climate, rainfall, and possibility of irrigation and drainage. It is apparent that a very large number of economic problems must arise in connection with the land supply for food: such as problems of land-ownership, taxation, irrigation, drainage, forestry, and encouragement or limitation of population. We are just beginning to awake to the needs in this direction. The farm-lands supply, besides food, a large part of the raw materials

Fig. 1, Chapter 26. Natural Forest Regions of the U. S. for many other goods, all such organic materials as cotton, flax, wool, hides, feathers, lumber, and firewood. The farm wood-lots compose about 200,000,000 acres, and the large forests, public and private, about 350,000,000 acres, a total of about one fourth the area of the country in forests, containing about one half of the lumber that the country once possessed. The economic problem of a sound forestry policy is one of the most important we have to solve.

The rivers, lakes, and ocean waters near our coasts are other great sources of food, but no statistics are available to show adequately their yield. Few of them are in private possession, and they do not appear at all in a total of "capitals, " yet they are more important to the nation than a large part of the land area. They are only beginning to be developed artificially by the propagation of oysters, clams, and fish. The development of a proper fishery policy is an economic problem closely connected with that of agriculture.

§ 2. Agriculture and farms in the United States. There were nearly 12,400,000 persons in the United States gainfully occupied in agriculture in 1910, this being 32.5 per cent of all in occupations. These, together with other family members not reported as engaged in gainful occupations, constitute the agricultural population, and comprise more than one third of the total population of the country. "Agriculture" is here used in a broad sense, including floriculture, animal husbandry (poultry, bee culture, stock-raising), forestry and lumbering, and is even extended to include regular fishing and oystering.

With the exception of areas devoted to forestry on a large scale and to fishing, the industry of agriculture is pursued on the 6,400,000 farms, covering 46 per cent of the total land area of the country. Of the land in farms, a little more than half is classified as improved. The estimated value of farm property, including buildings, implements, machinery, and live stock, was, in 1910, about $41,000,000,000, somewhere near one fourth of the estimated wealth of the country at that date.

§ 3. Rural and agricultural. The adjectives rural and agricultural are often used loosely as synonyms. But agricultural refers primarily to the occupation of cultivating the soil, and is properly contrasted with other occupations, as mechanical and professional; whereas rural refers to place of residence outside of incorporated places of a specified minimum population (of late, 2500), and is properly contrasted with urban, applied to those living in larger population groupings. In 1910 the rural population comprised 53.7 per cent of the total population, but had fallen to 48.1 per cent in 1920. It is true that the two groups of the agricultural and the rural populations are largely composed of the same persons, but partly they are not. Many farmhouses, together with part or all of the farm-lands, lie inside urban boundaries, and, besides, some persons engaged in agriculture reside in urban places. On the other hand, any one acquainted in the least with a rural district (in the statistical sense) can at once think of many persons living there that are not engaged in agriculture; they may be merchants, warehousemen, railway employees, physicians, handicraftsmen, teachers, artists, retired business men, and others. The percentages given in this and in the preceding section indicate that about three fifths of the rural families are engaged in agriculture and two fifths are not.

It is often important to make this distinction, though it is difficult to do; for some of the much-discussed rural questions are of a broad social nature, are matters of rural sociology, relating pretty generally to the rural population; while other questions of "rural economics" are more strictly matters of agricultural economics and relate to the farm as a unit of industry, or to agriculture as an occupation.

§ 4. Lack of a social agricultural policy in America. It is a common remark that the farmer lives an independent life. This develops in him a self-reliant spirit. He readily gives and takes simple neighborly help in informal ways, but he does not readily turn to government for aid. "While every influential urban group, organized or unorganized,— manufacturers, merchants, wage-earners,—has sought and obtained special protective social legislation, the farmer, from choice or necessity, has usually had to work out his economic problems unaided. The exceptions are few and of small importance. For example, the prodigal land policy of the state and national governments encouraging the settlement of the frontiers was not a farmers' policy. It was originally inspired by the larger political purpose of extending the bounds of the nation; later it was advocated and fostered by a land-speculating element, linked with bad politics, in the frontier states, and not by farmers as such. It in time greatly injured the farmers of the eastern states. The "Granger legislation" to regulate railroad rates was so called by the East in a spirit of derision because it began in the distinctively agricultural states of the Northwest; but it had neither the aim nor the result of obtaining especially for farmers any rates that were not open to every one on the same terms. The tariff rates on American agricultural products, placed in the acts as a matter of form, have, with minute exceptions, been ineffective to favor farmers, as the shipments were nearly all outward and few inward, while heavy and effective rates were placed on most things that the farmers had to buy.1

In part, the explanation of the lack of legislation favoring farmers is to be found in their small part and influence, as a class, in political affairs, outside of minor executive offices in township and county governments. In the state legislatures farmers are few relative to their numbers in the community, and still fewer in either House or Senate in "Washington. Moreover, the farmers have rarely asked or received, as a class, any favoring legislation. Among the real exceptions to the otherwise fair record of the farming class in this respect is the tax on oleomargarine and the special favor accorded to farmers' associations in the Clayton Act. It might be cynically said that the farmer has not been "sharp" enough to get his share of the "good things" that the business classes were passing around in protective legislation. But farmers have, as has every economic group, interests that may legitimately be the subject of social legislation; whereas they have limited their attention to their private affairs at home and have been prone to vote patiently and proudly the "straight ticket" to elect business men and lawyers to office. There are evidences, with increasing organization among farmers, of an intention to seek political power and favors, which promises to present a new problem of monopoly and bodes ill for the other elements of the community. The road of true progress is not toward more monopoly for farmers, but toward less monopoly for large business and favored commercial interests.

1 See ch. 16, 9 5