FACTORS OF AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION i 



33 



country, certainly not in the United States. Therefore we have 

 first to consider the question of bringing waste lands into use. 

 Let us assume that the country is all " settled," - that is, that 

 the population has increased and spread until all the land which 

 is sufficiently productive to attract cultivators has actually been 

 appropriated. In this case the existence of waste land will be 

 duo to one or more of three causes : ( i ) bad physical conditions : 

 (2) bad chemical conditions ; (3) bad political conditions. 



Bad physical conditions. There are many physical conditions 

 which could be described as bad, any of which would tend to 

 make land unattractive to, cultivators, and therefore to cause 

 it to go to waste. There are, however, three characteristic con- 

 ditions which cause considerable quantities of land of three 

 different types to go to waste. These lands may be described 

 as (a) too stony, (b) too wet, (c) too dry. 



Stony land. In the North Atlantic states of the United States 

 the first of these conditions is the most conspicuous of the 

 causes of waste land ; that is, most of the waste land is too stony, 

 though there are some swamps there also. Along the Southern 

 seaboard and the Gulf coast the second of these conditions is 

 the most conspicuous ; that is, most of the waste land is too wet, 

 though there are occasional patches of stony ground. But over 

 a vast area in the Far West, comprising fully a third of the en- 

 tire area of the United States, the land is too dry, and much of 

 it goes to waste on that account. There is enough of this land 

 to support an empire were it not for the absence of the one 

 missing factor, water. The early settlers in the eastern half 

 of this country found another condition which gave them a great 

 deal of trouble, namely, the presence of forests which had to be 

 cleared ; but this is not a condition which creates a problem for 

 the lural economist to-day. In fact it is now much more of a 

 problem to preserve our forests than to find ways of clearing 

 the land of them. 



