60 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



brought lower prices on the market, it was necessary to grow 

 more cotton to pay for the expenses of raising it. And the more 

 cotton that was grown, the lower the price dropped. And the 

 more the soil was bled by overcropping, the more it cost for 

 fertilisers to restore enough fertility to grow a profitable amount 

 of cotton. The sharecropper is one of the worst fruits of this 

 method of tillage. 



In the corn and wheat belts somewhat the same thing has 

 happened. Because corn and wheat, and the livestock fed on 

 corn and wheat, could be sold for the cash that was so neces' 

 sary to pay the mounting costs of machinery, taxes, and land, 

 and because they did not realise the destructive effects of one' 

 crop farming, the farmers turned most of their fields into corn 

 and wheat fields. They abandoned the old idea of agriculture, 

 which was that the farmer should be self'subsistent; that is, 

 that he should grow what he needed for himself and thus have 

 little need for cash. But as agriculture came into sharper con' 

 flict with industry, the farmer had to adopt the methods of in' 

 dustry, which are to accumulate money. And the only way to 

 accumulate money was to grow crops that could be sold, even 

 at the cost of finally exhausting the land. 



One extreme of commercial agriculture is a farm like the 

 Campbell wheat farm in Montana, where 50,000 acres were 

 planted in wheat. To grow this wheat $2,000,000 had to be 

 invested in machinery. 57 



Another important cause of sub'marginal land has been the 

 rapid depletion of the forests east of the Great Plains, especially 

 those of the Northeast, the Lake states, and the Appalachians. 

 Much rich land covered with the original virgin forests had, 

 of course, to be cleared to make way for farms and settle' 

 ments. But the remaining farm woodlands and the big com' 

 mercial timber tracts on the poorer soils and the steeper slopes 



57 "The Grass Lands," The Broken Sod, Section II, Fortune, November, 1935, 

 p. 187. 



