8 Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis 
removed, and the settler soon discovers that each year a new 
"crop" of stones will come to the surface. 
Moreover, even after the settler has laboriously transformed 
his tract of wild land into a farm, he is still not free of handi- 
caps. The soils are forest types, acid, deeply leached, and low in 
humus. The climate also has its limitations. Winters are long 
and cold, and the average length of the frost-free season is only 
124 days, which means that, in many years, corn cannot be 
matured. Small grains may be grown, but yields are less than in 
more southerly locations. The soils and climate are least unfavor- 
able for the raising of potatoes and hay crops, but potatoes are 
the only crop which shows higher yields in the cut-over country 
than in other parts of Minnesota.^ 
In spite of these scarcely attractive conditions, there are 
today some 3,272 farms in the community; the total acreage ''in 
farms'' is 475,129, an average of 145 acres per farm.^ In the 
whole area, land in farms occupies a trifle more than one-fourth 
of the land surface. But these averages mean very little. A 
better notion of the extent of agricultural settlement may be ob- 
tained from the dot map (Fig. 2) on which the dots are drawn 
true to scale so that the area they actually cover is the acreage 
they represent. The map shows a few areas 'of nearly solid black, 
wivi*"*^. much of the surface is in farms, and a rather large area 
where ilic/^ is almost no settlement, as well as some sections of 
intermediate density. 
The m-^anlng of this pattern cannot be grasped without a 
more concrete notion of the character of farming in the area 
than can be gained from a dot map of acreage in farms. The 
2 S. A. Engeu:^ and G. A, Pcrul, Agricultttral Production and Types 
of Farming in Muuicsola, Univ. -^f Minn, Agric. Exp. Sta. Bull. 347, 
Statistical Supplemtnt, 1940. 
3 These figures are averages of \i. ivc _%cars 1936 through 1940, 
prepared by the writer from mai.u^Ci '{.. returns of the Minnesota 
State Farm Census. This census is taken annually, on a township 
basis, by local assessors, under Federal supervision. Unless other- 
wise identified, agricultural statistics in ihis paper are 1936-1940 
averages, from this source. 
