er cent. Besides the permanently arid acres,
moreover, there is other unusable land in national forests, roads,
cities and in swamps and over-flow lands difficult to reclaim. With
these deductions made, we have only 1,252,000,000 acres as the maximum
farm area of the future. This is 31.1 per cent. greater than the
present farm area.[11]

It is true that a larger part of the farm area can be cultivated. From
1900 to 1910 the area of improved lands increased 15.4 per cent. If
this rate of increase could continue there would be about one billion
acres improved by 1960, and this seems to be the absolutely {179}
outside upper limit. But this does not mean that a billion acres could
be improved and cultivated at the same cost per acre as at present.
The improved lands would require a constantly increasing amount of
capital and labour to secure returns equal to those which the farmer
now obtains.

Similarly there are limits to the extent to which we can afford to
divide up our land into smaller farms in order to secure a larger
production per acre. Intensive cultivation is an alluring phrase but
in the production of many staple crops intensive cultivation is dear
cultivation. The movement in progressive agricultural communities is
towards a moderately large farm. It is the smaller farms (of from 20
to 99 acres) that the boys and girls leave most rapidly. "The farm
management studies," writes Mr. Eugene Merritt of the U. S. Department
of Agriculture[12] "indicate that on these small-sized farms, man
labour, horse labour, and agricultural machinery cannot be used
efficiently. In other words, economic competition is eliminating the
unprofitable sized farms."[13]

{180}

The pressure of agricultural population upon a given farm area results
either in the growth of an inefficient small scale production or of a
large rural proletariat. Both are undesirable and neither will permit
farming on as cheap a scale as at present. The actual trend to-day in
districts where cereals are raised is towards larger farms (of 150 to
300 acres), and this tendency is likely to be increased by the
introduction of cheap tractor engines, which now seems to impend.
There is doubtless a considerable opportunity in the United States for
an improvement in the average product per acre even though the increase
in the area of cultivation constantly brings in land of decreasing
fertility. If in the course of forty or fifty years we can increa