8 AGRICULTURE, MANUFACTURING, COMMERCE 



cultural products show a steady and rapid growth. Considering 

 both our imports and exports of agricultural products we find 

 that our net exports are only about $300,000,000 a year. The big 

 agricultural exports are, of course, cotton, packing-house products, 

 grain (especially wheat and flour) and tobacco. The big agricul- 

 tural imports are coffee, leather and hides, sugar, rubber, and silk. 



Agricultural Land of the United States. The United States 

 has in its vast land area of two billion acres enough land to provide 

 each man, woman and child of the population a twenty-acre tract. 

 Of course, a large share of this land is not tillable. Much now is 

 and must ever remain desert or mountain. At the 1910 census, 

 only eight hundred million acres was "land in farms," and only 

 half of this was "improved." By improved land is meant all land 

 regularly tilled, or mowed, land pastured and cropped in rotation, 

 land lying fallow, land in gardens, orchards, vineyards, and nur- 

 series, and land occupied by farm buildings. The unimproved 

 land in farms is, as indicated above, some four hundred million 

 acres. In other words, our thirty million farming population on 

 six million farms is actually utilizing but one-fourth of our land 

 area. The average acreage of the "farm" in 1910 was one hundred 

 and thirty-eight acres; of the "improved land" in the farm, 

 seventy-five acres. In 1900 the average of improved land per farm 

 was seventy-two acres, which indicates a slight tendency to increase 

 the amount of land farmed by one farmer. 



Exploitation and Conservation. The economic history of the 

 twentieth century in the United States begins with the birth of 

 the doctrine of conservation conservation of our soils, our waters, 

 our rivers and our forests. This beginning marks a reaction against 

 the nineteenth century of wanton and feverish exploitation of 

 these same resources. The "soil-robbery" carried on by isolated 

 and competing individuals, and known as farming during these 

 hundred years, left a legacy of soil exhaustion problems for future 

 generations to solve. 



Better Business for Farmers. Sir Horace Plunkett declared 

 the rural life problems in the United States to be better farming, 

 better business, better living. The report of the Roosevelt Country 

 Life Commission found that from the commercial standpoint 

 farming is not profitable enough, considering the labor, energy 

 and risks involved, and the social and sanitary conditions of the 

 open country. 



The unattached man on the farm stands alone against the better 

 mobilized interests of manufacturing and commerce. As a pro- 



