June, 1942] Agricultural Experlment Station 5 



3. Unfavorable areas : areas unfavorable for commercial dairying- 



Production of roughage difficult. Market not good. 

 Marketing facilities often not developed. Sometimes no 

 pastures, or farms too small to support ten or more cows. 



4. Non-agricultural areas : areas not farmed 



Mostly forest land. Usually rough and mountainous. 



This differentiation into areas is based on considering the farm 

 land of each group of farms as a unit in which the combination and 

 pattern of tillage land, pasture land, and forest represents certain 

 opportunities in dairy farming. The boundary lines roughly delineate 

 the areas that would make up such a pattern. There is no intent to 

 be exact in the inclusion of the forest land, and for this reason the 

 size of the areas was neither measured nor estimated. For example, 

 a favorable area along- a river might include 20 farms in which there 

 are a total of 900 acres of level tillage land, 1500 acres of rough but 

 fairly productive pasture, 1800 acres of rough, stony woodland, and 

 300 acres of wasteland. 



In New Hampshire there is usually a wide variation in size and 

 character of farms in each locality. A few small impoverished farms 

 may be interspersed among the better farms in a favorable dairy area. 

 On the other hand, some very productive farms may be found isolated 

 among semi-abandoned barren ones. The areas delimited on the 

 county maps in Figures 1 to 11 describe only general conditions. 

 There is no intent to infer that all farms in favorable areas represent 

 good opportunities in dairying or that all farms in an unfavorable 

 area are not productive. 



The dairy operators in certain areas were handicapped for a long 

 time by the delay in building good all-weather roads. The farms may 

 have been productive but the daily trucking of milk over poor roads 

 placed the operators at such a great disadvantage that the land and 

 buildings on the farm could not be maintained. And now, although 

 there may at last be adeciuate roads, the tillage land has "run out," 

 the pastures ha\'e grown up to brush, and the buildings have dete- 

 riorated in the 20 years or more of semi-abandonment. It is usually 

 not economic to redeem farms of this description for commercial 

 dairying. Such locations may also have the further handicap of so 

 small a volume of milk produced in the area that the daily marketing 

 of this milk is rather costly. These considerations were included in 

 this study and even where an area has potential possibilities of con- 

 siderable volume of milk production, if the cost of development was 

 prohibitive the area was rated as unfavorable. The price of milk in 

 the next few decades is not likely to be sufficient to justify the expense 

 of reclearing, rebuilding, and improving such farms. 



Distribution of Farms by Size of Herds 



It is important to consider the size of the dairy herds in each 

 county and in the state as a whole in attempting to understand the 

 production problems and to predict the labor needs and plan conserva- 

 tion practices for the area in question. 



The town inventories record cows on almost 13,000 farms, but 



