CHAPTER III 



FARMING VERSUS LAND SPECULATION 



As already mentioned in the preceding pages, only half the 

 land in the United States is now in farms; only half the land in 

 farms is " improved"; and this improved land, according to some 

 critics, is not well farmed. It has also been shown in a preceding 

 paragraph that farm land is passing out of the hands of the dwellers 

 on the land, and, unless the tendency of the past forty years is 

 broken, the time is not far distant when the land will practically all 

 be farmed by tenant farmers or hired labor and not by the owner. 



The criticism is also heard with increasing frequency that the 

 farmer is one-third farmer and two-thirds speculator. This criti- 

 cism is based on the fact that a part of the farmers aim to make 

 their profits and do make their profits by selling their land, not 

 by farming it. Many farmers frankly admit that were it not for 

 this speculative gain their years of toil would show no balance to 

 their credit. Indeed, the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture has 

 stated that "the average farmer is only making wages; he is not 

 making a profit over his wages and the interest on his investment." l 

 As long as farmers own the land, the American people will doubt- 

 less be content to see the farmer receive as a reward for his years 

 of toil this speculative gain coming from increase in land value. 

 But when the land passes from the hands of the men who farm it, 

 the question of " overcapitalized land" will doubtless become an 

 insistent one, and one raised by the farmers themselves. 



Overcapitalized Land. The agitation among farmers which 

 led to the " granger laws" for state regulation of railroads was 

 based on harassing conditions: rates were unsatisfactory and 

 discriminatory; railroads, especially of the western and Pacific 

 States, were greatly overcapitalized. Perhaps overcapitalization, 

 or "watered stock" as it was called, was the most loudly denounced 

 of the evils. Briefly, the farmer considered it wrong that a road 

 costing twenty-five thousand dollars a mile should be capitalized 

 at forty or fifty thousand a mile. Applying this same logic to land 

 now that was applied to railroads forty years ago, it may be an 

 evil to capitalize land costing $25.00 an acre at $50.00 an acre 

 an evil to the farmer and to the general public. 



1 Experiment Station Record. Feb. 1915, p. 105. 

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