l6 GEOGRAPHICAL CONCENTRATION. 



nor yet to any general recognition on the part of the farmer 

 of the unmistakable advantages accruing from a diversified 

 agriculture. The era of low prices through which the country 

 has been passing and the enormous shrinkage in our exports 

 of grain have done much to stimulate it. Until recently the 

 rapid numerical increase and growing prosperity of our own 

 population, added to the apparently illimitable capacity of 

 foreign countries to absorb our surplus production, have af- 

 forded a ready market for even the largest of our crops. 

 But however it may be in the future, there has certainly been 

 a suspension of the conditions that obtained for so many 

 years Largely as a consequence, there were withdrawn 

 from the cultivation of wheat in thirty- five states of the 

 Union, between 1879 and 1889 and doubtless in the closing 

 years of the decade, no fewer than 8,440,508 acres of land, of 

 which 2,463,740 acres were in Iowa, 1,204,080 acres in Wis- 

 consin and 977,610 acres in Illinois, the whole constituting an 

 area nearly three and one-half times as great as the total 

 wheat acreage of the United Kingdom. Imagine the effect 

 of such an element of disturbance upon the general order of 

 crop distribution ! Is it any wonder that the farmer should 

 have recourse to a system of agriculture that will to a large 

 extent relieve him of the necessity of a continual readjust- 

 ment of his farming operations to meet possibly temporary 

 fluctuations in the demand for particular products? 



Immeasurably the most important of recent events, in its 

 bearing upon American agriculture, is the practical exhaus- 

 tion of the public domain. While there are still millions of 

 acres of land inclosed in farms, but not yet brought under 

 cultivation, no such addition is likely again to be made to the 

 cereal acreage of the country as has been witnessed almost 

 annually for many years past. 



One inevitable result of this fact, taken in conjunction with 



