Distributive Relationships of the Agricultural Pattern 100 
to warrant the use of the best labor-saving machinery even though 
the financial outlay is heavy. 
The farm improvements as a group are suggestive neither of general 
poverty nor of marked prosperity (Fig. 12). Over three-fourths of the 
sets of improvements are either good or fair. The number of farms 
with fair sets of improvements is but slightly in excess of the number 
with good sets. The number of farms with excellent sets exceeds but 
slightly the number with poor sets. The sets of improvements on six- 
teen of the largest seventeen farms are only fair. 
Almost three-fifths of the total farm acreage is operated by tenants 
(Fig 13). The highest incidence between tenancy and acreage exists 
among farms exceeding 320 acres, where tenants are in charge of more 
than ninety per cent of the 19,033 acres represented. Only 43.49 per 
cent of the total farm acreage is owned and operated by landlords. 
However, these land owners actually operate 54.82 per cent of the 
total farm acreage (Fig. 14). The supplementary acreage rented by land 
Owners provides an average increase of more than twenty-five per cent in 
the amount of land farmed. At present, 68.33 per cent of all farmers of 
the American Bottoms are land owners (Fig. 15). Over half the land 
Owners who cultivate their own farms have holdings which are eighty 
acres or less in extent (Fig. 16). Only 4.1 per cent of the land owners 
who operate their own farms have farms larger than 240 acres. 
A few large tenant farms tend to obscure the fact than over two- 
fifths of the land is farmed by owners; that over half the land is farmed 
by individuals who own land in the American Bottoms; and that over 
two-thirds of the farmers are land owners. 
The crop pattern.—Wheat and corn are the most important crops by 
acreage. They embrace over three-fourths of the field crop acreage (Table 
2). Twenty-one other kinds of field crops are represented, but none of 
these crops accounts for as much as six per cent of the total field crop 
acreage. Wheat, corn, potatoes, sweet corn, and horseradish occupy 
more than ninety per cent of all the acreage in field crops. 
Although wheat and corn are outstanding crops for the American 
ttoms as a whole, their relative importance is not everywhere the 
Same. In some places crops of minor rank for the American Bottoms as 
@ whole increase materially in acreage and even become more important 
than either wheat or corn. On the basis of acreage variations in the 
relative emphasis placed on the different kinds of field crops, nine differ- 
“nt types of agricultural economy have been identified (Table 3). Two 
cf the types are differentiated also on the basis of animal husbandry. 
