V. AGRICULTURAL INDICATORS. 



General relations. — As the basic economic practice of plant and animal 

 production, agriculture furnishes the standard for measuring the possibilities 

 of soils, climates, and regions. There are many reasons for this, chief among 

 them the fact that it gives relatively large and immediate returns upon a 

 small capital. In addition, its operations are within the scope of the indi- 

 vidual or family, and farming has inevitably become the traditional basis of 

 the American homestead. The latter has played such a wonderful role in the 

 development of the West that it has come to be regarded as a fetich, able to 

 reclaim the most arid desert or to enrich the most sterile soil. During the 

 last two decades the large majority of the homesteads filed upon have proved 

 failures and the percentage of failures will steadily increase as still less promis- 

 ing regions are entered, unless the method of settlement is radically changed. 

 The time when individual initiative would suffice to convert a tract of virgin 

 land into a prosperous farm has gone. While millions of acres of public lands 

 still remain for settlement, these are of such a nature that land classification, 

 reclamation, demonstration, and cooperation are indispensable to their con- 

 version into successful farms and ranches (plate 58). 



LAND CLASSIFICATION. 



Nature. — The classification of land is an endeavor to forecast the type of 

 utilization that will yield adequate or maximum returns. Properly, it should 

 determine the optimum use as accurately as possible, and should insure the 

 conditions under which development and utilization take place. In actual 

 practice, classification has been conspicuously absent as a preliminary to the 

 settlement of the arid regions of the West. Hurried and incomplete classi- 

 fications have been made for special purposes, but these have covered only 

 certain portions of the vast public domain and have usually suffered from in- 

 adequate and hasty methods. Perhaps their greatest fault has been that 

 they were made with a particular end in view, and the primary object was to 

 include or exclude as much land as possible without reference to its optimum 

 utilization. In this respect the recent classification under the Ferris Act 

 has been an improvement, but it has been handicapped by legislative restric- 

 tions and by the lack of an adequately trained field personnel. It has been 

 especially unfortunate that only those lands were examined which had been 

 filed upon, with the result that the examiner's judgment or decision was often 

 influenced by local pressure. To the one who is interested solely in seeing 

 the public domain developed in such a way as to secure the best economic and 

 social conditions, it is incomprehensible that the prerequisite of an accurate 

 and unbiased classification of the land should have been so long ignored. 



Such a land classification would necessarily take account of the enormous 

 amount of scientific reconnaissance and investigation done in the West, during 

 the last thirty years especially. It would rest upon a rapidly increasing 

 fund of practical experience and experimental study of crops and methods, 

 and upon the paramount importance of drought periods and their recurrence 

 in climatic cycles. In method, it would be complete, detailed, accurate, and 



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