2 20 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



months when the vegetation is more abundant. A large 

 acreage is required to support a family even in a modest 

 pioneer manner, as is indicated by the fact that under the 

 Grazing Homestead Act, which allows only 640 acres to an 

 applicant, but 20,000,000 acres had been designated by June 30, 

 1919, divided between nearly 33,000 applicants. Practically 

 all these grazing homesteads which offer the slightest possi- 

 bility of success have been applied for. When an Indian 

 reservation is now thrown open to settlers there are many 

 applicants for every desirable piece of land. In the summer 

 of 1904 there were in one case 106,308 persons registered with 

 the hope of drawing farms where there were but 2412 pieces of 

 land of 160 acres each for distribution. 



Land settlement. While free land, useful for agricultural 

 purposes, is scarce and no longer plays an important part in 

 the maintenance of landownership on the part of farmers in 

 the United States, there is much unoccupied land in the old 

 forest regions which is now on the market at a low price. 

 Whether the price is relatively low when compared with the 

 old prairie farms may be doubtful, but the absolute figures look 

 small to the farmer who has worked $200 land as a tenant until 

 his hair is gray and who is still unable to make the first payment 

 on the farm he occupies. The man in this position takes a 

 trip to the cut-over country and finds an eighty-acre farm with 

 thirty acres cleared and the remainder covered with second- 

 growth, interspersed with occasional open grass spots connected 

 by cow-paths. At first blush, before he has any idea of the 

 cost of clearing the remaining fifty acres of brush land except 

 the opinion given by the land agent, and without any knowledge 

 of what a year's labor will yield on this farm, $50 or $60 an 

 acre sounds cheap. It is within his means. The desire for a 

 home of his own after many years of tenancy turns the balance 

 quickly in favor of buying. Thus it is that a good deal of the 

 savings of tenant farmers occupying high-priced land is used 

 in getting homes on the lower-priced and less valuable land. 

 While this tends to emphasize tenancy in the regions of high 

 land values it provides the funds for developing new lands and 



