LAND AND OTHER AGENTS OF PRODUCTION 179 



It is evident that an additional reason why cattle or sheep raising 

 is peculiarly suited to hilly regions is due to the fact that the product 

 may be driven to market or the output reduced to a compact form, 

 such as cheese or butter, which is easily transported. Other and more 

 intensive ways of utilizing such mountain or piedmont lands are pre- 

 cluded by the difficulties which such regions present to the extension 

 of good roads, railways, or other means of communication. The 

 Cumberland Plateau furnishes a striking illustration of this point. 

 EDITOR. 



50. TREE CROPS FOR THE HILL LANDS 1 

 BY J. RUSSELL SMITH 



As a consequence of rocks and hills, large areas of the United 

 States are utterly unplowable and practically useless, except for 

 forest possibilities. Other large areas are of low fertility, low pro- 

 ductivity, and difficult to work because they are hilly and somewhat 

 stony, and have therefore been run down and robbed. We have not 

 yet learned how to unlock one-half our agricultural resources. Agri- 

 culture depends upon plants, and plants depend upon heat, light, fer- 

 tility, and moisture. Now we have added to those four the purely 

 unnatural and complicating fifth qualification suitability of the land 

 to be plowed and to stand continued plowing. Let us keep the plow, 

 but cease to depend upon it so completely. 



There stands abandoned New England, a chaos of stones, rocks, 

 hills, an unending amazement to the natives of the good agricultural 

 districts of America. "How," these people are continually saying, 

 "how in the world did the Yankees of past generations ever wring a 

 living from among those rocks ? " As long as agriculture was a matter 

 of plowing, it is no wonder that the New Englanders fled the land until 

 farms by thousands were gladly to be given away if you would only 

 pay a fraction of the value of the buildings. Shall the American people 

 be baffled merely because we cannot plow the land when it has all the 

 other qualifications heat, light, moisture, and fertility ? 



There are Spanish acorns two inches long and, except for some 

 shortage of protein, surprisingly close to white bread in food content. 

 In Spain thousands of acres are given over to acorn orchards which 

 fatten tens of thousands of Iberian hogs without the intervention of 

 the labor of man in harvesting. The crop of the chestnut orchards 

 which occupy the steep, rocky, untillable mountainsides of Italy is 



1 Adapted from "The Agriculture of the Future," Harpers Magazine, January, 

 1913, pp. 273-80. 



