348 



READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



such a way that each is utiUzed to its full extent. The waste 

 possible in wheat-raising is very great. This fact must be taken 

 into account more and more as the cost of raising wheat is in- 

 creased. When land was cheap, the bonanza wheat farmer could 

 let his great caravan of machinery, implements, and labor skim 

 over the plains and the more ground they covered, the larger 

 would be the net as well as the gross returns. With a rise in the 

 price of land, however, a new item of expense had to be met and 

 more value had to be secured from each acre used, if the business 

 was to pay. The bonanza farmer had no way of getting more 

 value from the land per acre. The small farmer, however, could 

 add to the returns by more careful wheat-farming. He could save 

 waste, and take an owner's interest in the field cultivated. 



We thus see that the rise in the price of land, by means of 

 which the diversified farmer crowds out the wheat farmer of 

 southern Minnesota, enables the wheat farmer owning i6o or 170 

 acres to crowd out the bonanza farmer of the Northwest. In 

 either process the movement is toward a kind of farming which 

 produces more per acre. Though the rise in the value of the land 

 is partly the result of the more intensive farming, yet the social 

 and other advantages of a settled community are in themselves 

 powerful factors in increasing this value, and, as already shown, 

 the rise in value in turn forces a more intensive system of farming 

 upon such communities. 



The relative advantages of wheat-farming and the more intensive 

 diversified farming can be further compared by means of the follow- 

 ing data gathered from the United States census reports of 1900 : 



