The Agricultural Shift

The condition of agriculture and country life in North America has been modified by three great shifts,—the shift in geographical location, in methods of practice, and in institutions. Some of the more obvious features of these shifts we must briefly examine.

The Geographical Shift in Rural Occupations

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Both the necessity for governmental interference and the nature of the interference are conditioned on the status of the rural industries at any particular time. We are all aware that we live in a time of great shift. The center of population is moving westward, and there is movement from country to city. Remote lands in the East tend to lose in population, and remote lands in the West tend to gain in population. There are still great areas of new development and consequently of unstable conditions. The geography of markets has undergone great change. The great shift in the East has come about very largely as a result of free trade with the West.

The popular mind has pictured a great decline in eastern agriculture and a corresponding increase in efficiency of western agriculture. This opinion is founded in part on statistics and in part on the larger base on which western agriculture is often conducted. This is often more apparent than real. We may follow some of the statistical comparisons between New York and some of the corn-belt states by way of illustration, and later we shall endeavor to determine the significance of some of the changes. Comparison by states is, of course, always indecisive and often very fallacious, because the state unit is not uniform in size, population or general condition; but we have no better way at present of making rapid contrasts.

In 1850, 1860 and 1870 New York held first place in the value of farm property. In 1880 it lost first place to Ohio; in 1890 it took third place, being exceeded by Illinois and Ohio; in 1900 it took fourth place, being exceeded by Illinois, Iowa and Ohio. In population there has been a marked decline in rural communities. According to the figures of Rossiter, in 1850 five rural counties in New York showed a decrease in population; in 1860, nine; in 1870, nineteen; in 1880, eight; in 1890, twenty-three; in 1900, twenty-two; in 1905 (state census), twenty-one. It appears that forty-three counties have shown a decrease in population at some period during the past century. Twenty-eight counties, or one-half those outside the metropolitan districts, have a smaller population today than they have had at some previous time, and these counties represent nearly one-half the entire area of the state. There has been a decline under the maximum of more than eighty thousand persons in the rural counties of the state. Rural communities in some parts of New England have less population today than they had one hundred years ago. This decline seems to be expressed (1) in migration of population to cities and to other regions; (2) in lower birth-rate.

Between the years 1880 and 1900 there was an annual decrease in value of farm property, if the census figures are comparable, of seven and one-third millions of dollars. For the same period there was an annual decrease in the value of land and improvements of nearly eight and one-half millions of dollars. Similar apparent depreciation occurred in other eastern states. In Ohio, for example, the shrinkage of land values from 1880 to 1900 amounted to more than sixty millions of dollars.

The apparent reaction.

It should be said, before passing this subject, that it may be a question whether the census figures of the different years are in all respects comparable. Conditions of money and of values are not the same at any two twenty-year periods. In 1880, we may not yet have passed altogether the inflated values of the war period. These census figures are now old and great changes have taken place in the seven or eight years since the more recent ones were made. Some of these changes seem to be indicated in the most recent figures. A current discussion of “changes in farm values” published by the United States Department of Agriculture and covering the years 1900 to 1905, makes a very different showing from those that we have been in the habit of quoting. These figures of the Department of Agriculture are estimates and computations and I do not know whether they or the census figures more accurately represent the exact status of agricultural conditions. Even for the census year 1900, the differences in values as reported by the census and as computed by the Department of Agriculture amounted for New York state to nearly ninety-nine millions of dollars for the value of land and improvements, including buildings. The computations of the Department as between the years 1900 and 1905 show a gain in similar values for the state of New York of more than one hundred and eighty millions of dollars. In more specific categories, the following figures from the same source show that there is a decided increase in farm values and, therefore, presumably in farm efficiency. The values of “medium farms” per acre for the years 1900 and 1905 in New York in the different classes of farming are as follows:

The percentage increase of real estate value of such farms in the state for the years 1900 to 1905 are represented by the following figures:

These various figures are given here merely to illustrate the fact that the geographical base of agriculture has changed and that it may be expected still further to change; and that a reaction is likely to follow a great shift. Any shift of considerable area is likely to affect some localities disadvantageously.

The Shift in Agricultural Method

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Farming exhibits the remarkable changes that have taken place in the last fifty years in the modes of doing work. The plow is still called a plow and for the most part it is yet drawn by horses (as it will continue to be drawn); but even the plow is a very different implement from its predecessor of a generation ago. Few implements are more perfect than the present-day plow in the application of mechanical principles and in workmanship. The slight variations in the slope and shape of the moldboard and in the construction of other parts, produce marked results in the effect on the physical condition of the plowed land. The chilled steel construction has produced an implement of new adaptabilities. The plow has come to be a construction of lightness, grace and beauty, and of great effectiveness.

Most agricultural tools have shown a similar evolution. Even the common fork has undergone marked change. Light hand tools are of many new kinds and forms. But it is in the range of machinery that the change appeals most to the imagination. To be sure, the great development of farm machinery has been mostly for the easy conditions of level-area farming and for the more wholesale operations, but the development has been marvelous nevertheless. The mere mention of the names of some of the farm machines will recall how great the change has been: from the sickle to the cradle, to the reaper and self-binder; from the scythe to the mowing-machine; the hay-rakes and hay-loaders; all the hay forks and stackers; the corn-harvester; the great separators or threshers; the sowers, planters and transplanters; manure-spreaders; the grinders and feed-mills; power ditching-machines; the spraying machines; the new kinds of vehicles; all the multitude of special milk-manipulating, butter-working and cheese-making devices; the adaptation of steam, gasolene and even electric power; and the marvelous range and beauty of tilling implements and machines. Within fifty years, the cost of producing a bushel of corn has been reduced by two-thirds; a ton of hay by nearly as much; and of other products in similar proportion.

The change is probably even more remarkable in the farmer’s attitude toward the reasons that underlie his work, although this shift does not appeal so much to the popular imagination. His attitude toward soil fertility has undergone a complete change; so has his attitude toward the feeding of animals and the treatment of their ailments; so has it toward diseases of plants and toward the insects. He speaks a new language. Even when the old farm seems to show no visible change in external matters, the farmer himself cannot avoid attacking his problems in a new way. Butter-fat is a reality. There are new crops on his land—alfalfa, cowpeas, crimson clover, macaroni wheat. If he lives in the northeastern market-milk section, he has seen the red and brindle cow change to black and white; he has developed the winter production of milk and has made the silo a part of his farm scheme. He has a new conception of cleanliness, as a result of the studies in bacteria. He has a rational outlook on potato blight and oat smut and codlin-moth. He has respect for ideas in print, because the ideas are worthy of respect. All this changes his methods of work. With all these great shifts in the methods of farming, it is natural to expect unequal shifts in effectiveness of the business, for some persons react responsively to such changes and others do not. The least adaptable persons find their lot harder by competition with the others. Profound changes have resulted in the whole attitude of the man toward his business.

These shifts in mental attitude are largely the direct result of the colleges and experiment stations and bureaus devoted to agriculture; and herein is the one great aid that society has rendered to the countryman.

The Shift in Rural Institutions

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It requires no imagination to see that rural life is, in some respects, in a state of arrested development, as compared with the cities and towns. The native institutions have been copied in cities and greatly extended; the rural population now looks beyond its own institutions to those of the city,—to the city school, the city church, the city library, the city stores, the city amusements. The great constructive movements of the day have passed the country by. The nativeness of rural institutions has been allowed to die out, and the country has been left socially sterilized. Centers of interest are elsewhere. In many regions, the farmer will talk politics, war and city questions and anything else rather than farming. I would not have my reader feel, however, that this is peculiar to these later days. I well remember vehement discussions whether the pen is mightier than the sword, but I never heard a debate on the plow, which is really mightier than either.

Many great economic and social changes have directed the attention of all the people cityward. Canals, railroads, telegraphs, postal routes have drained the country into the city. Wealth has been piled up at the terminals, which are the trading places, until society has become ganglionic in its organization. Banking systems take the money from the hands of those who earn it, and put it into the hands of those who trade with it. The earnings tend to leave the place of their origin to build up remote or aggregated interests. The organizations that control farmers by controlling their products are in the cities. The tariff-for-protection system has fostered this general aggregational movement. It has tended to the concentration of wealth. If it has aided the farmer, it is because it has aided some one else first and more.

We have been living in an epoch of city development, with no adequate means of redistributing or returning the energy to the regions of its origin. It has been a process of dump. We are now, however, at the beginning of a new species of rural drainage, consequent on the wide extension of highway building, of trolly lines, of rural free deliveries, of telephones and other local-centering agencies. In other words, we are now entering the epoch of the small city; into these cities the surrounding country now will drain. This will develop new centers of influence, with a consequent shift of the social equilibrium. This condition is being aided from the city itself in the rapid growth of suburbanism. These new conditions constitute one step towards vitalizing the open country, but of themselves they will not reach the open country effectively.

Among existing rural institutions, the church and the school should have most influence; yet the rural church is largely inert or lost, and the school is in a state of arrested development. Following a discussion of abandoned farms in one of the eastern states, a farmer’s wife, long a teacher and leader, wrote me the following letter; this letter I publish because it is an expression of the way in which some of these questions appeal to an experienced person on the spot; how widely it applies I do not know.

“The neglected farms of L_____ should not be charged against either indolence or agriculture, because the main business of the township, extending over a period of twenty years or more, has been a religious war. There are three churches in the Town Center, representing as many denominations. Sometimes one has flourished, sometimes another, but sentiment respecting all of them is ever active. I have known crops to be neglected, work delayed, families divided, while the combatants awaited the outcome of some petty squabble over church affairs. One not familiar with conditions can hardly imagine the littleness of the superannuated gospel-splitters who are often sent to such outlying parishes. The war has been a continuous one for years. One pastor after another departed, in dudgeon, to have the combat renewed by the next one. This is all matter of public record, if any one wishes to inform himself. You may or may not have knowledge of this, but it is not a local phase. It is my firm belief that this is the situation in other “abandoned farm” districts if the truth were known.

“Much the same thing can be said of the schools. You will not agree with me, but after spending some years in L_____, and having been reared in a family of teachers, I am convinced that the schools also are often ‘abandoned.’ School officers may be too busy working their own farms and interests. They often have not the first idea of broad policy or even worthy public duty. I am not sure but that the farm might produce men of better caliber if we could ever get rid of the theory that grammar is more important than death or taxes. No close study of the town of L_____ is needed to note the marked mental degeneracy of its younger members against the earlier men.

“And Agriculture? Well; no one ever built a church or school for agriculture. The silence of nature is a poor competitor amid the loud acclaim of decimal and dogma. After I was married, many of my relatives and friends in L_____, observing my husband’s methods, came to him for counsel. He hammered one relative into going every day (several miles) to the Exter creamery, even with empty cans, if need be, to induce others to join him. He placed in the town the first pure-bred bull, and now several others have followed. He sold cows at reduced prices to get herds started. He induced another relative, who lives on the homestead and is making money, to take his grades and rear them as an object lesson. He went to the Exters and pointed out the advantages of a milk-station in that section. ‘Get something started,’ he would say; ‘it will gather strength as it goes.’ Now they have the skimming-station, and, for the first time in years, L_____ is looking men squarely in the face. The ‘conversation’ is changed. The Exters (splendid characters) have at last demonstrated that a little separator in a creamery is better than a big separator in a church.

“No greater error could be made, by men of intelligence, than to cry abandoned farms when abandoned brains is meant. L_____ is a beautiful, fertile valley. The neglected farms are effect, not cause. The abandoned church and the abandoned-school-houses are standing directly in the way of rural progress and all the efforts of agricultural teachers cannot overcome the loud paternalism of these two powerful obsolete institutions that stand like feudal castles awaiting the dynamite of revelation.

“But, after all is told—mark this! Out of that ‘God forsaken’ town have come the best men, the most sterling characters (independent of their financial troubles) that I have ever known. The happiest years of my life were spent there. My little girl’s fine father was born and reared there. The world has its compensations. I know and love these people, and the most impressive picture I will ever have of the great Field Shepherd with his people hovering about him, is outlined by a faded wall in that farming town.”

The “Abandoned Farm” as an Illustration of the Agricultural Shift

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The process of the shift in occupancy of land has resulted in the desertion of some areas for customary agricultural uses. Homesteads have become unoccupied and the buildings have fallen into ruin. For this condition the name “abandoned farms” has been applied. The words are inexact, since the land is really not abandoned, but belongs to some one, and is still classed as property; but the term has become so well fixed in the public mind that it expresses phases of our contemporary agriculture better than any other phrase. I therefore use the term for convenience, to express the idea of the lessening present use of certain lands, and also because it enables me to arrive at my subject without tedious explanation.

In the discussion of abandoned farms, we have usually confused the economic and personal results. Our regret for the abandonment of these farms is, in fact, largely sentimental. We are thinking of the human lives that have been lived in the stark old houses, where the wind blows through the creaky roofs and into the openings that once were windows and doors. We are impressed by the ancient orchards, with bleaching limbs and rotting trunks. Generations ago, perhaps, the good-man and his wife hewed the farm from the wilderness, erected the laborious buildings, and planted the cider-apple trees between the rocks. A little brood was reared. One by one the children went out over the hills and made homes for themselves; but one of them remained on the old farm, cherishing the old rocks and living content under the old roof-tree. The old place became more hallowed with the years. Even the decay of the old house passed unnoticed. What was the neglect and dilapidation to the visitor from the city, was the object of veneration and sacred memories to the owner. But finally no youngster clung to the homestead. One went to the city store, another on the railroad, another took to sea, and another went west. Age overtook the old folks. The bushes encroached on the back lot. The stone walls fell to ruin. The kitchen roof tilted and fell in. The old folks died. The house was closed. The stripling forest overran the orchard and the garden. The tansy now haunts the old dooryard.

I have no desire to analyze at this time the causes of the so-called abandonment of farms, or to make any close study of the results; I wish only to call attention to some of the grosser features of the movement, with the purpose of establishing a point of view for my reader on some of the coming relations between the state and the farmer.

The “abandoned farm” question is supposed to be an eastern question, and in a way it is so: that is, relatively difficult lands were settled in the East because other lands were not available; the adjustment to changing conditions comes first, of course, in the older communities, and the older the community the slower the adjustment is likely to be. Similar questions are pressing agriculture in all parts of the country, however, so that the eastern question is only a phase of continental or even world-wide questions. The farming in the great agricultural West has been easy, and it has therefore risen with phenomenal rapidity. The greatest skill in the end develops under the greatest difficulty. The West has set the East many good examples of agricultural practice. It will not be surprising if the East works out some of the difficult social problems, and makes a close adjustment of agricultural practice to local conditions.

The illusion of old buildings.

A common measure of the supposed decline of farming is the fact that many farms can now be purchased for less than the buildings cost. This statement of itself does not appeal to me as having any special significance. A property is likely to sell for what it is worth, and this worth depends on its effectiveness as an economic unit or enterprise. Most of the buildings on these farms were erected a generation or more ago, when the ideas of farming were radically different from those of the present day. It is doubtful whether most of these buildings were ever really effective even for the old kind of agriculture. At all events, few of them are adapted to the business that we must now conduct on the land. Many a farm would really be worth more with the buildings off than with them on, for they would not then stand in the way of actual betterment. Buildings are not permanent attachments to land and should not be so regarded. A country-man is always impressed, when he goes to the great cities, with the fact that buildings still in good state of preservation are torn down to make place for new ones. These demolished buildings may not even be very old, but they are ineffective for present-day business and it is unprofitable to keep them. The coming business of farming will demand a wholly new type of building in order to make the property effective, and we must overcome our habit of harking back to the time when the present buildings were erected. Barns and other business buildings that were erected fifty or sixty years ago should owe the farm nothing by this time. My reader must realize the fact that we are beginning a new agriculture, not continuing an old one.

We must be careful, also, not to be misled merely by the appearance of farm property. The mere abandonment of farm buildings may or may not be a cause of apprehension and regret. Buildings may be abandoned because two or more properties have been combined into one and not so many buildings are now needed; or because the farmer has moved from an old building into a new and better one. In many parts of the East, the buildings are no doubt too many and the farm properties too small for the greatest effectiveness. These properties were laid out or divided at a time when the great West was unknown and when these eastern lands grew the grain and other tilled crops for the large markets. Some of them were probably laid out in their present form in war time, when conditions were wholly abnormal. Many of the buildings were erected when lumber and other materials were cheap and when the comforts and facilities now placed in barns and residences were unknown. Moreover, deserted farm buildings are likely to stand until they fall down. In cities, land and location are valuable, and old buildings are torn down to make room for the new structures. Therefore, the country contrasts strongly with the city in respect to its buildings. The staring and windowless farmhouses appeal to the imagination of the town visitor, and he accepts them at once as evidences of failure and decline.

In order to determine the significance of deserted farmhouses, an inquiry has been made in one of the townships in a so-called abandoned farm region. Every deserted farmhouse in the township was recorded. Conditions there are as bad as anywhere in that region; yet by count, there are only forty-five vacant farmhouses in the township, the area of which is more than forty-five square miles. One might draw the conclusion at once that there are forty-five abandoned farms in the township. It is doubtful, however, whether there is a single really abandoned farm in this area. It is true that there are many fields on the higher farms that are not used except for hay and pasture, and some of them are not even used for these purposes. Practically all these so-called abandoned farms are either owned or rented by near-by farmers and have really become a part of the adjacent farm. The house is unoccupied for the simple reason that the farmer needs but one house. A few vacant houses have been deserted by families who have lost their homes on mortgage, but apparently not primarily from fault of the land. Many others have been sold because of discontent on the part of the owners, who wished to try their fortunes elsewhere. In some cases the owner has died and the house is unoccupied because the estate has not yet been settled. A few more are vacant because tenants cannot be secured, and the farm is rented to whomever is willing to take it on shares.

Old fields.

Similar remarks may be made with respect to many of the apparently abandoned fields. Because of inability to secure labor, the fence-rows and fences are often not as clean as formerly, and the roadsides have a shabby appearance. Fields are often grown to weeds; yet these fields may be only resting until the owner finds time to put them into crop, or they may be used for light pasture, or they may be in the process of returning to forest. Of course, they are relatively ineffective pieces of property, but the conclusion must not be reached, because they are unkempt and not in use at the time, that they are abandoned or that the owner considers that he is obliged to desert them.

The significance of the general situation.

It is unquestionably true that there is lessening utility of some of our farming lands. In the face of this fact, however, three other facts stand out prominently: (1) Markets are as good as ever, for there is no decline in the purchasing power of the people (rather there is a reverse tendency); (2) the land is still productive, notwithstanding a popular impression to the contrary; (3) good farmers are better off today than they ever were before.

We have heard so much about the abandonment of farms that we are likely to think that it measures a lessening efficiency of agriculture. We must not be misled, however, by surface indications. We are now in the midst of a process of the survival of the fit. Two opposite movements are very apparent in the agriculture of the time: certain farmers are increasing in prosperity, and certain other farmers are decreasing in prosperity. The former class is gradually occupying the land and extending its power and influence.

The older farming was practically a completely self-regulating business, comprising not only the raising of food and of material for clothing, but also the preparation and manufacture of these products. The farmer depended on himself, having little necessity for neighbors or for association with other crafts. In the breaking up of the old stratification under the development of manufacture and transportation and the consequent recrystallizing of society, the old line fence still remained; persons clung to the farm as if it were a divinely ordained and indivisible unit.

We are now approaching a time when the traditional boundaries must often be disregarded. The old farms are largely social or traditional rather than economic units. Because a certain eighty acres is enclosed with one kind of fence and assessed to one man does not signify that it has the proper combination of conditions to make a good farm.

We must consider that the agriculture of the eastern states is now changing rapidly. It has passed through several epochs. The possibilities of agriculture in the East lie largely in a new adaptation to conditions, and in its diversification. This diversification is already a feature of the East. It is significant to note that while New York, for example, ranks fourth in value of farm property, it ranks as low as seventeenth in farm acreage, showing that the yield per acre is far greater than in many of the competing states. In the total value of farm products, New York is exceeded by Iowa, Illinois and Ohio. In the value of farm crops, in 1899, it held fifth place, being exceeded by Illinois, Iowa, Texas and Ohio. Considered with reference to the value of farm products per acre, it leads the states in this list, the figures being New York, $15.73 per acre; Ohio, $13.36; Illinois, $12.48; Texas, $12.25; Iowa, $12.22; and New York is exceeded by New Jersey and most of the New England states. Considering the fact that New York state is one of the largest states east of the Mississippi, this condition also indicates that New York is internally less developed than some of its competing states. Illinois ranks first in value of farm property and first in available farm acreage; Iowa ranks second in the value of farm property and second in available acreage; Ohio ranks third in value of farm property and third in available acreage; New York ranks fourth in value of farm property and seventeenth in available acreage. The above statements suggest the reverse of decadence in eastern agriculture, whatever may be the statistics that express changing values or whatever may be the popular fancy to the contrary.

A further evidence of the great diversification of agricultural enterprises in New York, as a representative of eastern conditions, is shown by the fact that in a list now before me of twenty-two leading products of this latitude, New York stands first in the production of eleven of them, whereas no other state ranks first in more than two or three of them. While the agriculture of the state in general shows a decline as measured by the census figures, the main lines of special development are in a condition of increased vigor and effectiveness; and this remark may be extended to other eastern states. The wonder is not that certain lands are returning to forest, but that, in all this shift and the rapid development of the West, the state has been able to hold the position that it still occupies.

This rapidly moving readjustment and diversification will produce fundamental changes in the mode of farming and in the economic, social and political outlook of the people. In the mode of farming, it will force new business organization; and when new acres cannot be had, the old acres will be doubled by using them to greater depths. In very many ways, the shift is now demanding a new kind of study of agricultural questions. This redirection of agriculture is bound to come in every state; and we should meet it hopefully. Nor would I have my reader feel that this readjustment is all in the future. It is proceeding at the present time, and with greater momentum and effectiveness than many of us, I suspect, are aware. After many years of touch with the problem and with the men who are capable of judging it, I am impressed that the persons who are most alarmed are those confined largely to offices and who are given to the study of statistics.

The situation with individual farms.

A discussion of statistical generalities does not exhibit the status of the individual farmer nor give us specific reasons for the decline of profitableness in farming. Every farm is a problem by itself and what may have been responsible for the defeat of one farmer may not have been the cause of the embarrassment of his neighbor. Some of the decline no doubt lies directly with the man, quite independently of the land: it is psychological and perhaps even hereditary, and in its community aspects it is social; but these phases I am not now prepared to discuss.

The larger number of the farms of apparently declining efficiency are in the hill regions. In New York, many of them are on soils of the volusia series, particularly on the volusia silt loam. This soil is of low humus content, usually with a high and compact subsoil, and limited root area. Many of these farms are unsuccessful in part because of their climate. They are elevated. It is often impossible to grow with profit the common varieties of corn and even of other grain. Sometimes the difficulty lies in their remoteness and the cost of transportation, together with the poor schools and social disadvantages that are a part of such isolation. Usually these hill lands are expensive to work, and they do not lend themselves well to open tillage. Very frequently they suffer for lack of under-drainage. If the elevation is too high to grow good wheat it may also be too high for good clover, since clover is usually seeded with the wheat.

These high and rough lands are not so frequently plowed as lower and flat lands and, therefore, they are not cleaned, do not receive the benefit of rotation, and they are likely gradually to deteriorate in physical condition.

There has also been great change in market demands. Beef-raising has gone out of the East. It was a simple thing to grow the beef and to raise the milk in the old time, but it requires skill to grow and market a modern steer and to tend a modern dairy herd. With relatively few cattle, there is insufficient enrichment of land. The farmer on these hills is likely to practice direct sales; that is, he sells his timothy hay and other products direct, removing thereby a large amount of fertilizing value and saving nothing of the crop except the roots and stubble to return to the land. This primitive mode of general farming allows a man to make a profit only on a single sale. The manufacturer tries to turn his property over more than once, each time expecting to realize a profit. When the farmer is able to market his forage largely in the shape of animal produce, he will not only save fertility but should make a profit on both the crop and the animal. The selling of baled hay rather than pork and beef and milk and eggs, cannot be expected to yield much profit or satisfaction to the average farmer or to keep his land in living condition. Taking it by and large, no agriculture is successful without an animal husbandry.

The popular mind pictures these so-called abandoned lands as exhausted in their plant-food, but this is probably not often the case. Very many of them are potentially as productive as ever, but they are run down; yet even at their best they might not be able to satisfy a man who lives in the twentieth century. Human wants have increased. What would have made a good and comfortable living seventy-five or one hundred years ago, would not support a man in the way in which he ought to live today, nor would it attract his boys to remain on the land.

Lack of adaptation.

All these and other causes of the decline of individual farms can be expressed as a lack of adaptation to the natural surrounding conditions. Good agriculture is the perfect adjustment of the methods of the farmer to the particular region and circumstances, thus making all effort count and eliminating waste. This is why some of the European farming is so much better than our own. In the end, therefore, good farming is not a question of West or East. One often finds excellent farming in what are generally considered to be poor agricultural regions.

It is a biological fact that animals and plants cannot thrive unless they are well adapted to the conditions in which they live; and, if they are wholly unadapted, they perish. Now, farming in this country is not yet adapted to the natural conditions of soil and climate and market and other environmental factors. In fact, we really do not yet know what the soil factors are, if, indeed, we know to any degree of accuracy what any local factors are. If some of our eastern farms have changed from corn and wheat to hay, and if they have not prospered under this change, then it follows that they have not yet found their proper adaptation. It is not at all strange that this adaptation is lacking, since there has been no means of putting the farmer into touch with his own problem. Not one of the older farmers was adapted to his environment by the church or the school or by any other educational or social agency. If he is now adapted to the conditions in which he lives, it is because of some accident of heredity or circumstance, or because of his native wit. We can never adapt the business of the farm to its conditions until we understand thoroughly all the problems involved, and there has been no serious effort to understand these particular problems until within very recent time.

Much has been said about the disadvantage of the eastern farms in competing with the western farms. I am convinced that they often suffer quite as much by competing with each other or with regions close at hand. In a thirty-mile drive, I traveled a flat country where oats were a good crop and harvested by machinery and drawn from the fields in high-piled racks; I also traversed a country of high and steep hills in which oats were a poor crop and not harvested by machinery and were hauled from the declivities in small loads. It was evident that the latter region could not compete in the raising of oats with the former, although they were less than twenty miles apart. The one region seemed to be well adapted to oats and the other, at least on the hillsides, was not a profitable oat country. In other words, the farmers on the hills had not adapted their farming to the hills. I suspect that a bushel of oats cost them at least 50 per cent more than it cost the men at the other end of the county. Yet, I think that there is a way of profitably farming such hills: many men have proved it.

Point of view as to remedies.

While I am convinced that the general condition of eastern agriculture is prosperous and hopeful, we all know that there are very great problems and that some regions are much more disadvantaged than others. If we are to discuss remedies we must first of all establish a point of view.

We must first disabuse our minds of all prejudgments and consider the conditions as they actually exist and in their relations to the general progress of the race. Our outlook must be forward rather than backward. We must overcome the influences of many phrases and trite statements that have long been public property. It is said that the farms are the bulwark of the nation. Like all trite sayings, this is both true and false. We need the conservative element of the farm, that has its feet planted directly on the verities of the earth. But we must remember that poor lands usually raise poor people. I do not conceive it to be necessary that all the lands in any commonwealth should support farm families in the sense in which we have understood it in the past. It is much better for the commonwealth, both from the economic and social points of view, that many of the lands should be devoted to forests or even allowed to run wild than that they produce people that are only half alive. I should want to keep the conservatism of the agricultural peoples, but I should want this conservatism to be constructive and progressive.

I am not ready to admit that the traditional “independent” farm family on 80 or 100 acres is always necessarily essential, as we have been taught, to the maintenance of democratic institutions or to the best development of agriculture. The size of holdings and the relation of the family to the land, are likely to change radically in many regions, and we must be prepared to accept the fact. The American has a traditional fear of large estates, but such estates are bound to come in some of the remoter regions. We should now be sufficiently established in democracy to have forgotten our early alarm at such estates. Very likely we shall repeat to some extent the experience of Germany and other countries, where leadership of large agricultural estates has contributed to welfare.

In the discussion of abandoned farms, I fear that we have been misled or even scared by a phrase. We have accepted the term “abandoned farms” as itself a statement of fact and have seemed to reason from it as if it presented a single condition of affairs. Our imagination has often outrun our reason. It is not so much a question of abandonment as of shifting occupancy and radically changed conditions. If these conditions had been expressed with equal emphasis by some other phrase, the discussion of the question might have taken a wholly different direction. Suppose, for example, that a part of the problem had been expressed in the term “farms becoming forested.” The least imaginative of my readers will at once see that a wholly unlike line of thought might have evolved from the discussion and wholly different conclusions might have been reached. There is really no problem of abandoned farms as such. The so-called abandonment of farms does not represent one condition but many conditions; not one series of facts but many series of facts; not one forthcoming result but many results. The condition of agriculture, even though we admit it to be bad in many particulars, is not a cause for alarm, but is rather a reason for new and careful study. Nor does this condition affect agriculture alone; it is rather a problem of economic evolution, that concerns the organization of society, and consideration of it cannot be separated from the discussion of general welfare questions of the day.

Mere public propaganda cannot solve these questions of land occupancy. Associations and conventions cannot solve them. Importations of labor cannot solve them, much as it may help the individual farmer here and there. It is a debatable question whether we should try to restock many of the present farms merely by putting a foreign family on them. Perhaps the very reason why these farms are in the process of decline is that they are necessarily ineffective economic units and are not capable of being directed into a farm management that is adaptable to present conditions. Merely to put families back on many of these farms would be to continue the old order; and it is this old order that we need to modify or to outgrow.

Viewed as an economic question, the shifting of farm occupation should not disturb us more than other shifting of population. In the present day, some of the lands that are now “abandoned” would not have been settled. They would remain in timber; and now, by the inexorable power of economic forces, they are returning into woodland. Some of these farms ought to be abandoned to other uses. It is a misfortune for a man to be obliged to inherit one of them, and be sentenced for life to live on it. He would much better try to escape.

No mere treatment of symptoms can have much permanent effect on agricultural conditions. Many agricultural localities are making great effort to secure summer boarders. This may aid a certain class of persons; but as the summer boarder advances into the open country, agriculture is likely to recede. The solution of the problem is a long-time process. It is not merely adding fertilizer, nor killing daisies and paint-brush; it may not be even a question of making the farm more productive. The little-farm-well-tilled idea will not solve the problem. It must be a process of reorganization.

Let us bear in mind that the questions of ineffective farming are not new. Just now the emphasis seems to be placed on the so-called abandonment of farms, and on certain kinds of propaganda that promise to solve these difficulties. We have passed through many epochs or eras of wide-spread propaganda, in each one of which some one factor was supposed to afford the means of relieving agricultural distress. I remember that at one time the emphasis in agricultural discussion was placed largely on the farm mortgage, but we have learned that a mortgage on a farm is not inherently different from a mortgage on any other property. I recall very well when the era of compounded fertilizers was at its height: all one had to do was to have the soil and plant analyzed to determine the deficiencies, and then to prepare a medicine to cure the disorder. I remember the advent of farm machinery, which was supposed to be able to solve the farmer’s difficulties. I saw the beginning of spraying for insects and plant diseases, and it was figured up for us what losses we suffer from bugs that prey on our crops; it has cost us more to fight bugs than to fight Indians, counting the value of crops that they destroy; spraying would provide a remedy, and yet bugs are still with us. At one time the emphasis was placed on underdrainage, and we need a recrudescence of this teaching. In parts of the great West, the emphasis is naturally placed on irrigation. We have looked to the rural free deliveries of mail as one of the great means of alleviating agricultural isolation and failure. The good-roads people have been sure that the lack of traversable highways is the cause of the so-called agricultural decline. Lately, various kinds of extension work have been strongly in the public mind. We are just now in the era of soil surveys and other soil studies. We are beginning to talk in a new way about the old and yet unknown subject of farm management. We are talking freely of social questions, without knowing just what they are.

Every one of these epochs has placed us on a higher plane, and yet we have never heard more about agricultural decline than within the past ten and twenty years, notwithstanding that this is the very time when the agricultural colleges and experiment stations and governmental departments have been expanding knowledge and extending their influence. The fact is, that all these agencies relieve first the good farmers. They aid those who reach out for new knowledge and for better things. The man who is strongly disadvantaged by natural location or other circumstances, is the last to avail himself of all these privileges. We have learned that it is not sufficient merely to start good movements, but that we must have some active means of reaching the last man on the last farm, so long as he lives there. This is by no means a missionary work; it is rather a duty that the state owes to its citizens, to provide those persons in difficult positions with the best possible means of making their property thoroughly serviceable. It becomes in the end, therefore, a personal question as to how information and education can be taken to the farms in such a way that the farming shall profitably adapt itself to its environments. The failure of a great many farmers may be less a fault of their own than a disadvantage of the conditions in which they find themselves.

It is fairly incumbent on the state organization to provide effective means of increasing the satisfaction and profit of farming in the less-fortunate areas as well as in the favorable ones, both as an agency of developing citizenship and as a means of increasing the wealth of the state. The state cannot delegate this work, nor can it escape the responsibility of it. It is primarily an internal question. The questions must be attacked just where they exist, and with the sole purpose of solving them for the good of those who meet them.

The outlook for the hills and remote lands.

Wherever farming is not now profitable, a special effort should be made to readjust the handling of the lands to the conditions of climate, soil topography, markets and the like. Any one who has traveled much in the northern states will have noticed the superior quality of the tree growth and the grass cover in that region. Of course, the unproductive areas, whether on hills or plains, present very many conditions and they may be adaptable to many kinds of agriculture; but in the particular type of hill land and remote land which is now most in the public mind, I look for the development of at least three strong forms of farming:

1. Fruit-growing for export. We have developed great skill in the methods of caring for orchards on the relatively level lands of the special fruit sections, but we have given very little attention to the growing of first quality apples in the more hilly regions. In such regions we cannot practice the type of clean tillage that we advise for other lands. Some relatively simple and inexpensive type of farm management must be applied to them. There is every reason to think that large areas in the East that are now practically unknown to fruit may grow a grade of apples that will be in great demand in the foreign trade. The state can well afford to undertake some large demonstrations in the growing of such orchards.
   
   
2. A revival of the animal industries and the extension of dairying. With the continued development of great city markets, the dairy industry must grow. Many of the hill and outlying lands are no doubt admirably adapted to pasturage and forage crops for cattle and sheep and swine; but the livestock interest, aside from dairying and poultry-raising, is altogether too small in the East. The eastern states should now be making inquiries into the condition of the animal husbandries within their borders.
   
   
3. The growing of forests. It is to the forest crop that vast areas of the roughest, highest and most unproductive lands of the East are best adapted. As near as I can determine about one-third of New York, for example, is in woodland. In some counties, even outside the Adirondack reservation, two-fifths of the land is reported to be in wood-lots. This is a greater area than is devoted to any other crop, and it probably yields less profit per acre; yet in the census year New York led all the states of the union in the value of farm-forest products.
   As a people, we must reorient ourselves to the subject of forests. The forest is, or ought to be, considered as a crop. Natural forests are not necessarily the best forests, so far as the production of timber is concerned. Nearly all natural forests abound in unproductive areas, and in trees of very slight commercial value, which are as much weeds in the forest as Canada thistles are weeds in the corn-field. Man can produce a better commercial forest than Nature usually does.
   These forests may well belong to the people. Schools and towns could be supported by the proceeds of good community forests, at the same time that water-supplies could be conserved, wild animals protected, and the beauty and respectability of the country enhanced. When this time begins to come, the commonwealths that have rough lands may consider themselves to be fortunate. The town, county or state could well afford to buy some of these lands and devote them to forests. The United States government is well begun on this process, and this is right; but it is also necessary that the states and communities themselves acquire forests in order to maintain their institutions and to develop local enterprise, the importance of which I shall try to develop in the second part of this book.
   
   

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