VACANT CITY LOT CULTIVATION 33 



"Millions of acres of farm land are being held out of use and 

 other millions of acres are being cultivated on a wasteful and 

 inefficient basis. Land values have risen at an unprecedented rate. 

 They are based not upon what the farm will earn at the present time, 

 but on an expectancy of what it will be worth in the future. The 

 farmer's son or the tenant farmer, with little or no capital, cannot 

 hope to acquire possession of a farm when the price of land is so 

 high that his earnings would not pay the interest on the invest- 

 ment. The result is that land remains idle or in the hands of ten- 

 ants, and thousands of farmers' boys desert the country for the city. 



******* 

 What we need, and need badly, is a program of taxation which, 

 without throwing additional burdens on the bona fide farmer, will 

 place land now idle within the reach of men of limited means who 

 possess the ambition and the ability to cultivate it." 



You can see that poor ignorant people, women, boys, 

 cripples, old men, often on less than 100X150 feet each, 

 not only in Philadelphia, but as war gardeners in New York, 

 and most other towns, -have been able to support themselves 

 by their work on the land. You can do much better. 



To be sure, they had valuable land and often seeds free, 

 but for such little pieces of land these are small items, and 

 many of them had no certainty of having the land even for a 

 second year, consequently they could not have hotbeds or 

 any permanent improvement. You can make all these 

 things. 



Then what can you do ? Only remember they had intelli- 

 gent instruction and did the work themselves, and got the 

 whole product ; often the children helped they thought 

 it fun. It does not pay to farm a small piece of land where all 

 the workers have to be hired. Nor does it pay if one calcu- 

 lates merely to stick in seeds with one hand and pull out 

 profits with the other. 



