3 1 ] TENDENCIES IN LAN DO WNERSHIP 3 1 



sippi. There are in the state approximately 59,000 

 square miles, 1 or over 37,700,000 acres of land. How- 

 ever, not all these acres are included in farms. The 

 cities and towns take up a small percentage of the total 

 area, cutting down to that extent the amount of land in 

 farms. In the mountainous counties of the north, as 

 well as in the timbered and pine barren counties of the 

 south, there are vast tracts of land not brought as yet 

 within the scope of farming operations. So that, accord- 

 ing to the census, there are only 26,400,000 acres of land 

 in farms in the state. 2 These figures indicate that the 

 farms include only seventy per cent of the total acreage. 

 Moreover only forty per cent of the seventy per cent, or 

 twenty-eight per cent of the total, is reckoned as im- 

 proved farming land. 3 Both of these percentages, how- 

 ever, run much higher in the main farming section of 

 the state — that is to say, in the great body of central and 

 southwestern counties. In these counties all except a 

 little of the land is included in farms, and a compara- 

 tively large percentage of this farming acreage is cata- 

 logued as improved land. As an indication of the wide 

 scope the census gives the term improved acreage, it is 

 sufficient to say that it excludes from the category only 

 the land not yet brought into utilization for farming 

 purposes, together with the land once so utilized but 

 now covered with trees or shrubbery. Put into econ- 

 omic language this means that the improved acreage 

 connotes the land lying within the margin of cultivation. 

 There is really very little or no land outside the margin 

 of utilization in Georgia, although there is much land 

 lying under such disadvantages either of fertility or of 



1 Twelfth Census, vol. i, p. xl. 



% Ibid., vol. v, p. 692. s Ibid., p. 693. 



