264 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



plans have mostly confined themselves to plans for highways, 

 flood control, parks, and the like, leaving agricultural planning 

 chiefly to the agricultural agencies. One weakness of these 

 boards is that they lack administrative authority to carry out 

 plans they can only recommend. Nevertheless, they have 

 done much useful work in assembling facts and educating 

 public opinion. 



When people attempt to draw up plans for land use they 

 must know certain things. These things may be put into two 

 groups. First, there is the technical information. The way to 

 prevent soil erosion is technical information which anyone at' 

 tempting to do rural planning must know. How to control 

 traffic is necessary technical information for the city planner. 

 The second type of information might be called social and eco 

 nomic information. Technical information is fairly easy to get. 

 It is definite and usually follows known rules. Social and 

 economic information, on the other hand, is not definite. One 

 important piece of economic inrormation a planner must have 

 is what permanent markets there are for the things the people 

 in the planned area produce. The probable trends in popula 

 tion what do people want? what can they do? these are im 

 portant parts of social information. 



You can see that this social information is important, and 

 at the same time hard to get. The National Resources Board 

 in its 1934 report listed these three major headings as impor 

 tant types of social information which the planner must have: 

 (1) the outlook for population; (2) the outlook for indus 

 trial conditions and employment; (3) relation of mechanical 

 progress in agriculture to land utilisation and land policy. 



Information about population will tell the planner what 

 the market for goods will be, where that market will be, what 

 the requirements of cities will be, how many people will be de 

 pending on the land for a living and so on. The second head 

 ing covers the question of the use of industrial resources, power, 



