TENANCY IN THE NORTH CENTRAL STATES 515 



the price of land is below the average, but the actual number of 

 tenants has in many instances decreased. That is to say, some 

 farms which had been worked by tenants have passed into the 

 hands of owners, though in more cases, as in such pioneer sec- 

 tions as southwestern Kansas, the lower proportion of tenancy 

 is due, not to this movement but to the development of new 

 farms operated by owners, the tenant farms holding their own in 

 numbers or even increasing. Or the tenants may have decreased, 

 but not so fast as the owners, such being the case in the high- 

 priced sections of Illinois and in half or more of Iowa. This 

 of course means a decided increase in the size of farms. In the 

 thirty counties of Ohio having farms under $60 per acre on an 

 average, there was a decrease of more than 1800 in the number 

 of tenant farms, while in the rest of the state there was an in- 

 crease in this class of over 2900. In both cases the number of 

 landowning farmers decreased, giving as a net result a number 

 of farms for the state smaller by about 5300 than ten years ago. 

 As a matter of fact the farms increased in size in all states of 

 this group except South Dakota, but the increases were far from 

 uniform over the states. In those districts in which the system 

 of farming seems to be undergoing little change, an increase in 

 the proportion of tenancy seems as a rule to be associated with 

 an increase in the size of the farm. A gain in ownership, on 

 the other hand, is associated with a change in the opposite direc- 

 tion or with absence of change. This does not hold good in 

 districts where, for example, great wheat farms are being broken 

 up into smaller ones, for here the first result is an increase in 

 tenancy. 



Values of land and size of holdings are by no means the only 

 factors in the tenancy problem. Among others it may be men- 

 tioned that the character of the farming done is not the same in 

 the case of the tenant and the landowning farmer. In this North 

 Central group of states, according to the census of 1900, the 

 tenants had charge of more than their proportional number of 

 farms on which hay and grain were the principal products. On 

 the other hand, they had little more than half their proportion 

 of the live-stock farms. These two classes of farms comprise 



