A NATIONAL PLAN FOR AMERICAN FORESTRY 153 



these opportunities have been lacking, as in the southern Appala- 

 chians, much land is in cultivation which is rougher and less fertile 

 than land in other ^areas which has been abandoned. Not large in 

 the aggregate, but important in some areas as a cause for abandon- 

 ment has been the loss of an industry which afforded a market for the 

 agriculture of a particular area. A corollary factor has been the in- 

 creased taxes made necessary by the lessened tax base resulting from 

 the loss of the industry. The cutting of timber and the removal of 

 the timber industry in certain areas have resulted in loss of local 

 markets for farm products and increased taxes on the farms which 

 became a contributing cause to agricultural abandonment. Aban- 

 donment, in turn, may lead to further abandonment by reason of the 

 higher taxes on the remaining farms or lessened government revenue 

 and deterioration in community life. On the other hand, the leader- 

 ship of energetic and resourceful individuals in a community may 

 sometimes retard or even prevent abandonment. 



No survey of farm or agricultural land abandonment has been made 

 covering any large area of the United States. There have been a 

 number of limited surveys of small areas in connection with land use 

 studies, but they have not been extensive enough to provide a satis- 

 factory base for general estimates. They have been conducted at 

 different times and by different agencies, and therefore the results 

 are not directly comparable. It is necessary to judge the extent of 

 agricultural abandonment from the decrease in land nsed for agricul- 

 tural purposes as calculated from the Federal censuses. 



The total area of land used for agricultural purposes continued to 

 increase in the originally forested regions east of the Great Plains 

 until 1920. The Federal census of 1920 reported 279,000,000 acres 

 of agricultural land in these regions. 2 Approximately 60 percent of 

 this was crop land, about 25 percent was other improved land, and 

 1 5 percent was what is designated as unimproved land. The improved 

 land not in crops was largely plowable pasture and the unimproved 

 land was mostly pasture which could not be plowed because it is too 

 hilly or too wet, or because of brush, stumps, or rocks. Considering 

 these forest regions as a whole, the first decline in the total area of 

 land used for agriculture occurred during the decade 1920 to 1930. 

 The area of agricultural land declined by 14,000,000 acres, or 5 percent 

 (see table 2), and the land in harvested crops by about 15,000,000 

 acres, or 9 per cent (see table 3). There was less agricultural land 

 in these eastern forest regions in 1930 than in 1910, and about the 

 same area of crop land as in 1900. The decrease in crops from 1920 

 was relatively greater than the decrease in agricultural land because 

 some of the crop land went into pasture. 



2 Agricultural land as used in this report is the total area in farms less the area in woodland, as reported 

 by the Bureau of the Census. This item contains a small amount of waste or idle land not in woods which 

 cannot be separated from the land used for crop and livestock production. The extent of this item is not 

 sufficient to affect the conclusions derived from the data. 



