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

Sec. 1. #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
comprize 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), regular
fishing and oystering, forestry and lumbering. Agriculture thus
produces not only the food but (excepting minerals, including coal,
stone, natural gas, and oil) the raw or partly finished materials for
all the manufacturing and mechanical industries.

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 over 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.[1]

Sec. 2. #Rural and agricultural.# The adjectives rural and agricultural
are often used loosely as synonyms. 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. It is true that the two groups of the agricultural
and the rural populations are largely composed of the s