duction 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.

Sec. 8. #Prospect of more intensive cultivation of land in America#. As
the aggregate need for food increases in America there must come a
steady pressure upon our stock of land uses, resulting in d