18 RURAL SOCIOLOGY 



ordinary rocky, hillside pasture land, which, he holds, is much 

 more productive than the Montana land, and about as cheap. 



Almost universally, the prosperity of western agriculture and 

 the poverty of New England farming are explained by the dif- 

 ference in the fertility of the soil. Yet this difference is offset 

 in part by the better markets in the East. If a western farmer 

 should try to make a living at ordinary staple farming on so 

 small a farm as the average one in New England, using the prim- 

 itive New England methods, he would have as hard a time as 

 the New England farmer to make a living. On the other hand, 

 if the New Englander would use as much land as the western 

 farmer, and have modern labor-saving machinery, he would 

 probably be able to make as good a living. A young man wish- 

 ing to start out as a farmer would do better to invest in New 

 England land than in western land. A good Iowa farm will 

 cost from $75 to $100 an acre; good New England pasture land 

 from $10 to $25 an acre. 



New England writers on agriculture have made the mistake 

 of looking to Europe rather than to the West for their models. 

 They have held up as examples to the New England farmers Eu- 

 ropean peasants who cultivate a few acres to a high degree of 

 intensity to yield larger crops per acre. But they forget that 

 these mean small crops per man. Where labor is cheap and land 

 dear, as in the Netherlands or in the valley of the Po, it is eco- 

 nomical to raise crops with much labor and little land. In 

 the United States, where land is cheap and labor dear, the op- 

 posite method is better. And it is to be hoped that conditions 

 will never arise in the United States where labor is so cheap 

 and land correspondingly so dear, as in densely populated Eu- 

 rope. Since the price of labor in New England conforms pretty 

 closely to the price in the West, and general social conditions are 

 much the same, prosperous parts of the West ought to be the 

 New England models rather than Europe. With this idea in 

 view, the managers of New England agricultural colleges have 

 begun to draw on the West for teachers. 



The nearness of eastern markets, too, is a very appreciable 

 advantage to New England. On the railroads covering the sec- 

 tion, run the milk-trains which enter Boston every morning. 

 The farmers along any of these railroads deliver cans of milk 



