200 \CRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



How rapidly the relative areas of land devoted to the different 

 purposes are changing may be seen from this. Hardly one hundred 

 years ago the United States east of the Mississippi River was an 

 almost unbroken forest, comprising something over 1,000,000 square 

 miles, or about 700,000,000 acres. Now, after about a century of 

 settlement, there are not more than 300,000 square miles of merchant- 

 able forest land in the Eastern United States. About 330,000 square 

 miles have been cleared for farm land. The remainder has been culled 

 of its valuable timber and devastated by fire or else turned into useless 

 brush land. With the growth of population and the greater demand 

 for agricultural land the ratio between farm and forest land will 

 change still further. The forests will be more and more crowded into 

 the mountains and upon soils too thin or too poor for agricultural pur- 

 poses. It may be safely assumed that in fifty or one hundred years 

 the proportion of land devoted to the different purposes will change 

 almost as much as it has during the past century. These changes will 

 occur especially in the eastern part of the United States, because there 

 the forest is not confined, as it is in the West, to high altitudes, where 

 agriculture is generally impracticable. In the West the forests, with 

 a few exceptions, as in the low country around Puget Sound, are in the 

 high mountains, which rise in the midst of semiarid plains, and their 

 original area of 150,000 square miles, half of which lies in the Sierra 

 Nevadas and in the Cascades and half in the Rockies, has changed but 

 very little since settlement. In the West, the increase of agricultural 

 land must be secured chiefly through the irrigation of the semiarid 

 land. 



If we take a long look ahead into the future and try to picture to 

 ourselves what will be the ultimate proportion of farm, forest, range, 

 and desert in this country fifty years from now, in the light of the 

 increasing demand for agricultural land and of the approximate knowl- 

 edge of the climatic conditions and the physical properties of the 

 different lands in this country, we shall get something like the follow- 

 ing condition: 



Absolute forest land 19 per cent 



Intermediate between agricultural and forest land 2 



Agricultural land 51 



Grazing land 26 



Barren land 2 



Agricultural land. The area devoted to agriculture in a half- 

 century, instead of being 21 per cent of the total area, as it is now, 



