Sec. 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 readied and passed.  Most farms have a variety of soils and of 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 deteriorates 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 so 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 60 per cent of receipts were in most cases from various sources, and these figures did not include the value of produce consumed by the farmer’s family.

Sec. 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, therefore, measures the success of farming not by the farmer’s income, by the level of 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 comment 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 the use of machinery in large fields is far more extensive than 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.[1] 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 thoroly cultivated as do the European peasants, if wages were as low here as are the peasants’ incomes.