n be done by
restoring the natural condition of living, and among other things,
by showing that it is easier and making it more attractive to live
in comfort on the outskirts of the city as producers, than in the
slums as paupers.

We know already that the natural and healthy life is, that in the
sweat of our faces we should eat bread. We observe that everything
we eat or use or make comes from the earth by labor; but no one
knows how abundantly the Mother can supply her children. It is well
said that no man yet knows the capacity of a square yard of earth.

The farmer thinks that he has done well if he gets a hundred and
fifty or two hundred bushels of potatoes from an acre; he does not
know that others have gotten 1284 bushels.

("Mr. Knight, whose name is well known to every horticulturist in
England, Once dug out of his fields no less than 1284 bushels of
potatoes, or thirty-four tons and nine hundreds weight (about 34
bushels to the ton), on a single acre; and at a recent competition
in Minnesota, 1120 bushels, or thirty tons, could be ascertained as
having been grown on one acre." P. Kropotkin's "Fields, Factories
and Workshops," page 114.)

Let us realize what an acre means. An acre is a square about 209
feet each way, 4840 square yards of land. A New York City avenue
block is about 200 feet long from house corner to house corner. It
has eight city lots 25 X 100 in its front; about double that space
(17-2/5 lots) makes an acre.

An ordinary one-horse cart holds twenty bushels, so then a full crop
of potatoes from that space would fill 56 carts.

To raise potatoes as an ordinary farmer raises them, requires him to
go over the ground not less than a dozen times, plowing, harrowing,
marking, planting, cultivating, three times weeding, three times for
bugs, and digging; it would pay him to go over it much oftener.

If he plants his rows of potatoes three feet apart, to allow for
horse cultivation, he has 69 rows of 200 feet each; which makes him
walk at least thirty-three miles over each acre. If he has a
twenty-acre lot in potatoes, he walks each year more than 650 miles
over the field and gets, let us say, 150 bushels of poor potatoes
per acre, or 3000 bushels off his twenty-acre field.

Now suppose he cultivates the soil, instead of just "raising a
crop," and gets 600 bushels of fine potatoes to the acre, he need
plant only five acres, walk only 200 miles, and, because his
potatoes are choice and early,