LAND AND OTHER AGENTS OF PRODUCTION 203 



ness as a range at least the 300,000,000 acres of public grazing land 

 are very great. 



Desert land. About 2 per cent of the total land area will forever 

 remain desert. There are but few areas within the United States 

 which, either on account of the intense heat, very low temperatures, 

 alkali, or lack of rainfall, are unfit for the use of man and maybe truly 

 considered desert land. Such land is found in the Southwest about 

 the Gulf of California, in Nevada, in Utah, and in Oregon in the form 

 of arid basins. Ice-bound deserts are found in Alaska and on the 

 glacier-covered mountains. This land must, so long as the climatic 

 conditions of the country continue as they are, remain unproductive. 



Forest land. As we have seen, although some land can be won 

 from the plains through reclamation and dry farming, this area will 

 hardly be enough to offset the loss of productive land through the 

 growth of cities, and will at best supply only a small part of the addi- 

 tional area needed for raising farm crops. In the West, except in a 

 few places along the Pacific Coast, the forest area will not be reduced, 

 for the simple reason that the land there is not suitable on the whole 

 for agricultural purposes. If it were reduced, the result would be to 

 reduce the farm land lying below, which is dependent upon irrigation. 

 The additional agricultural land must come, therefore, chiefly from 

 the East through improvement of the present unimproved farm land 

 and swamp land, and at the expense of the forest land proper. The 

 forest land will be confined more and more to land which is clearly 

 unsuitable for agriculture, and will probably shrink to an area of 

 about 360,000,000 acres, or nearly one-fifth of the total land 

 surface. 



Intermediate land. In addition to these areas which are unsuitable 

 for any other purpose but that of raising timber, there will always be 

 belts and patches of land which are neither exclusively forest land 

 nor agricultural land, but may be devoted to either purpose as the 

 local conditions (such as density of population and distance from 

 markets) may make the one or the other more profitable. 



The hilly country of the Northeast, where stones and bowlders 

 render cultivation difficult, the hilly land of the Piedmont Plateau 

 and of the Ohio Valley, where the heavy soil makes erosion very 

 great, and the sandy land along the Atlantic Coast and in the lake 

 states are included in this class of land. This land, intermediate in 

 character, is included at present largely with the unimproved farm 



