106 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



tion. The former process has gone far. Thousands of acres in the 

 East and South have been made unfit for tillage. North Carolina was, 

 a century ago, one of the great agricultural states of the country, and 

 one of the wealthiest. To-day as you ride through the South you see 

 everywhere land gullied by torrential rains, red and yellow clay banks 

 exposed where once were fertile fields ; and agriculture reduced because 

 its main support has been washed away. Millions of acres, in places to 

 the extent of one tenth of the entire arable area, have been so injured 

 that no industry and no care can restore them. 



Far more ruinous, because universal and continuing in its effects, is 

 the process of soil exhaustion. It is creeping over the land from East 

 to West. The abandoned farms that are now the playthings of the city's 

 rich or the game preserves of patrons of sport, bear witness to the 

 melancholy change. New Hampshire, Vermont, northern New York, 

 show long lists of them. In Western Massachusetts, which once sup- 

 ported a flourishing agriculture, farm properties are now for sale for 

 half the cost of the improvements. Professor Carver, of Harvard, has 

 declared, after a personal examination of the country, that ' ' agriculture 

 as an independent industry, able in itself to support a community, does 

 not exist in the hilly parts of New England.'' 



The same process of deterioration is affecting the farm lands of 

 western New York, Ohio, and Indiana, Where prices of farms should 

 rise by increase of population, in many places they are falling. Between 

 1880 and 1900 the land values of Ohio shrank $60,000,000. Official 

 investigation of two counties in central New York disclosed a condition 

 of agricultural decay. In one land was for sale for about the cost of 

 improvements, and 150 vacant houses were counted in a limited area. 

 In the other the population in 1905 was nearly 4,000 less than in 1855. 



Practically identical soil conditions exist in Maryland and Virginia, 

 where lands sell at from $10 to $30 an acre. In a hearing before an 

 industrial commission, the chief of the Bureau of Soils of the Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture said: "One of the most important causes of 

 deterioration, and I think I should put this first of all, is the method 

 and system of agriculture that prevails throughout these states. Un- 

 questionably the soil has been abused." The richest region of the 

 West is no more exempt than New England or the South. The soil of 

 the West is being reduced in agricultural potency by exactly the same 

 processes which have driven the farmer of the East, with all his advan- 

 tage of nearness to markets, from the field. 



Within the last forty years a great part of the richest land in the 

 country has been brought under cultivation. We should, therefore, in 

 the same time, have raised proportionately the yield of our principal 

 crops per acre ; because the yield of old lands, if properly treated, tends 

 to increase rather than diminish. The year 1906 was one of large crops, 

 and can scarcely be taken as a standard. We produced, for example, 



