SKETCH OF MODERN AGRICULTURE i.i i 



by irrigation. Irrigation systems were developed in previous 

 periods of our agricultural history, but it is only within the 

 period we are now studying that public attention has been 

 directed toward the problem on a comprehensive scale. In 

 fact, it is only within this period that the people of the country 

 in general have come to realize the magnitude of the problem. 

 There is certain to be built an irrigated empire in the West. 

 To build this empire will require statesmen with vision and 

 with courage. Still more recently has public attention been 

 directed toward the problem of drainage. It is estimated that 

 within the territory of the United States, and capable of being 

 drained and reduced to cultivation, there are swampy areas suf- 

 ficient to support a population of 10,000,000 people, allowing 

 40 acres per family of five. 



Stock raising. The extension of the area of the cultivated 

 farms up to and within the borders of the dry belt, and the de- 

 velopment of irrigation schemes within that belt, are forcing a 

 complete reorganization of the cattle business. The cattle-ranch- 

 ing business has already declined considerably, but this has in 

 part been made up by the slight increase in sheep herding. 

 Some of the arid pastures of the West are better suited to sheep 

 than to cattle, and sheep are therefore, by a process of natural 

 selection, displacing cattle in parts of the range country. It is 

 therefore highly probable that the range cattle will diminish in 

 numbers, and that the country will be forced to rely on foreign 

 me; it or else upon beef grown as well as fattened upon the 

 farms. It is not probable, however, that cattle ranching is 

 doomed to extinction, though it can obviously never attain to the 

 importance it reached in the seventies and eighties. There is a 

 possibility, in the Appalachian highlands, of a revival of cattle 

 raising on a somewhat smaller scale than that which developed 

 on the Western range country. In this region, extending from 

 Maine to Georgia, there are lands too broken to compete with 



