258 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



You do not say it is worth the two suits of clothes your father 

 made in the tailor shop and sold at a profit of $25. But those 

 suits bought your bicycle. The twenty-five dollars merely repre' 

 sent the clothes. They are a symbol. 



Translate this process into the use of land. Wheat is worth 

 $1 a bushel. You would give a farmer $1 for a bushel of wheat. 

 If prices fall you might be able to get that wheat for 50 cents. 

 But whether you pay $1 or 50 cents a bushel, the wheat will 

 still make the same amount of bread. And it will take the same 

 amount of nourishment in the soil to produce the bushel of 

 wheat. 



Nature does not care how much a thing costs. There is no 

 such thing as money and trade so far as the process of life is 

 concerned. Land must have a certain amount of nourishment. 

 It will always need that nourishment, and if the land gets it, 

 it will always yield the same amount of food. 



You can see the difference now between the way man works 

 and the way nature works. In our present civilization the goal 

 of man has come to be the amount of money he can get from 

 the land. The goal of nature is to keep a balance between soil, 

 plants, and animals. 



The effect of this difference between man's goal and nature's 

 goal is this. Man has taken everything from the land which he 

 can sell. In many cases he has not bothered to return to the land 

 the nourishment which has been taken out by his crops. Thus 

 the land becomes increasingly poor. The yield is less. The 

 profits shrink. The land users fail. People decide that farming 

 is not so good a job as keeping a store or working in a factory. 

 The reason for this is that they have so misused the land that 

 they can no longer make a money profit as farmers. 



Thus we have failing soil and poor farmers. On the one 

 hand, there are men on the land unable to grow enough food 

 for their own use, and men in the cities too poor to buy food. 

 On the other hand, there are surplus crops choking the markets 



