M.— AGRICULTURE. 263 



All over the world it always astonishes the traveller to see on what bad 

 lands the new settler is now trying to farm. Evidently the good, 

 easy virgin land is no longer easy to find. It is indeed significant that 

 in the United States vast irrigation schemes are being carried out, though 

 they show little signs of paying interest on their construction ; that in 

 Canada new wheats are being acclaimed because they may extend settle- 

 ment into regions where killing frosts may be expected in August ; that 

 ' dry farming,' with a crop in alternate years only, has to be resorted to 

 in Australia and S. Africa. These facts would seem to show that land 

 is getting short in the world, at any rate the naturally productive laud like 

 that over which the great expansion of the nineteenth century proceeded. 

 "Where are we to find the 500 million acres of land such as was added to 

 the world's farm between 1850 and 1 900 ? 



In Europe there are still great areas of forest, swamp, and heath that 

 might be brought into cultivation, but the process would involve an 

 expenditure both of initial capital and continuing labour out of proportion 

 to the returns. Either the prices to be received for produce must rise 

 greatly or the cultivators must be content with a much lower standard 

 of remuneration before there is much addition to the European area under 

 cultivation. In fact, the present tendency is in the other direction — only 

 Italy, with its great pressure of population increase, is adding to its 

 farming land and reclaiming wastes. All over the poorer land of Great 

 Britain abandoned holdings and crofts may be traced, abandoned for 

 economic reasons alone, because men would no longer live and work so 

 near to the starvation level. Nothing but the direst need or a new scale 

 of prices, whereby agriculture becomes relatively the most paying industry, 

 will ever bring such land back into cultivation. Other European countries 

 to a less degree show the same tendency at work. Russia was one of the 

 granaries of Europe, but over a large proportion of that vast territory 

 production is precarious because of drought on the one hand and cold on 

 the other. It may be doubted whether there will be any great surplus 

 for export even when its agriculture has been fully resumed, so rapid had 

 been the growth of its population to a magnitude which makes the losses 

 of the last decade insignificant. 



In the United States there are still great areas of potential farming 

 land ; for example, 0. C. Baker (' Economic Geography,' 1925) estimates a 

 possible increase of the wheat area in the U.S.A. from the present 80,000 

 to 130,000 square miles. But little of this, however, is the natural 

 easily farmed land the settler looks for ; the drift of late years of American 

 farmers to Canada, the efforts to make good the arid lands by dry farming 

 and irrigation, show that the good land has mostly been taken up. What 

 remains is land on which capital outlay is required, land on which produc- 

 tion will always be more costly than on the great fertile plains of the 

 Middle West. As in Great Britain, the recent tendency in the United 

 States has been to abandon the cultivation of some of the poorer lands 

 and let them fall back to grazing. Canada still presents enormous 

 potentialities for settlement, though the vast areas the map reveals are 

 severely restricted by increasing aridity towards the west and by cold 

 northwards ; Baker considers an increase of the wheat area from 25,000 

 to 120,000 square miles as physically possible. But similarly on most 



