78 THE FARMER AND THE NEW DAY 



the year is rapidly growing. It is a healthy, normal, 

 educative movement. It leads to out-of-door life, to a 

 new understanding of country things, and occasionally 

 helps to educate a community to better farming. How- 

 ever, the growth of estates in this country is likely in 

 the near future to become a real problem. One can see 

 what the possibilities are, if unrestricted, by studying 

 the situation in Great Britain and Ireland up to very 

 recent times. Of course with our abundance of land 

 it will be a long while before the problem of the estate 

 is a national concern. But already in some of the 

 smaller states of the East, land that ought to be pro- 

 ducing crops for nearby markets is monopolized for 

 mere pleasure. Of course, if the farming of these 

 estates were really made to pay, the estate would sim- 

 ply become a large scale farm and would be judged on 

 its own merits. It is said that in one county in the 

 East nearly one-half of the land, some of it the very 

 best farming land of the county, has gone into estates 

 that probably will produce one-fourth of what the land 

 would produce if farmed by small farmers growing 

 truck crops for the nearby large markets. We have 

 seen not only in Great Britain and Ireland but in Ger- 

 many the government itself stepping in to break up the 

 large estates. It is a question that may need our at- 

 tention in America. 



Forestry. Theoretically forestry is a branch of 

 agriculture. When we are fully alive to its importance, 

 we shall treat trees as crops. It will require, however, 

 a very great stretch of the imagination to think of 

 forestry as a branch of farming. The farm wood lot, 

 however, is much more worth while than it seems to 

 most farmers. The time will come when it will be 

 worth while really to conserve our coal, and a not un- 



