Competition with Adjacent Regions 41 



particular problems until within very recent 

 time. 



Much has been said about the disadvantage 

 of the eastern farms in competing with the 

 western farms. I am convinced that they often 

 suffer quite as much by competing with each 

 other or with regions close at hand. In a thirty- 

 mile drive, I traveled a flat country where 

 oats were a good crop and harvested by ma- 

 chinery and drawn from the fields in high- 

 piled racks ; I also traversed a country of high 

 and steep hills in which oats were a poor crop 

 and not harvested by machinery and were 

 hauled from the declivities in small loads. It 

 was evident that the latter region could not 

 corhpete in the raising of oats with the 

 former, although they were less than twenty 

 miles apart. The one region seemed to be 

 well adapted to oats and the other, at least on 

 the hillsides, was not a profitable oat country. 

 In other words, the farmers on the hills had 

 not adapted their farming to the hills. I sus- 

 pect that a bushel of oats cost them at least 

 50 per cent more than it cost the men at the 



