Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 49, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 February 1917 — Waste Land and Wasted Land on Farms [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Waste Land and Wasted Land on Farms

Every non-producing acre of tillable land that profitably can be made productive is a loafer acre and should either be put to work or sold

ON THE average American farm there are certain waste areas of iiiuil. Some of these can be brought under the plow by using proper methods and a sufficient outlay of capital, but otlters cannot be made tillable by any reasonable expenditure of effort orjnoney. Of the latter, certain areas may be made productive by pasturing or giving them over 4o the production of timber, Many waste areas, however, Qwing to natural conditions, can never be profitably reclaimed, no matter how efficiently the land may be managed. Certain other ureas, found on almost all farms, may be termed wasted areas. That is, they are misused in such fashion that they produce* nothing that adds to the farm income. These two classes of waste and wasted land, not being productive of income, may be classed as nonproductive farm land. An important question to one who is considering leasing or buying a farm is, what- proportion ofthe land is nonproductive? And this question is almost equally Important to the man who o wns ..or operates a farm—ln the latter case the question might better take this form: What per cent of my land is adding nothing to my income? On farms where land is cheap this is not a vital consideration, as the inter; est on the capital invested in the nonproductive portion of the farm land is not great; but as lands become higher in price it becomes more necessary to study efficiency in the use of farm land In order to avoid the loss entailed by having much capital invested in nonproductive land. Every acre of nonproducing tillable land should be put to work or sold. Many farmers would make more money if their business were larger, but the size of a farm, from a financial standpoint, is measured not by the number of acres embraced in it but by the number that are producing crops, pasturing animals economically, or supporting a growth of marketable forest products. Nonproductive acres are loafer acres, and the money tied up in them is dead capital. On every farm, hpivever, there are certain areas necessarily devoted to nonproductive purposes. Fences, ditches, lanes, nnd building lots produce nothing themselves, but they are frequently essential to production on the rest of the farm. Nevertheless, they may occupy in the aggregate a considerable percentage of the available

land. It is a part of efficient farm management to see to it that this percentage is nd higher than necessary. In this connection, some interesting figures are given. It takes, for instance, only 209 rods of untrimmed hedge and only 214 rods of zigzag rail or worm fence to waste an acre of what might be productive land. For the same expenditure of land one can run 459 "rods of woven wire and 473 rods of barbed wire. Other considerations, of course, may make It desirable to use the hedge of the worm fence, but the waste Involved is a factor that should not be overlooked. ' Similarly, farm lanes often may be eliminated by a simple rearrangement of fields; headlands, or turning spaces at the edges of fields, avoided ; and the farmstead itself, the groups of farm buildings with their lots and yards, the garden and the orchard, made compact. In the case of the farmstead, however, considerations of health and attractiveness may well justify a slight sacrifice of economy. While a little planning often will re-

-suluin the saying of much land now devoted to these unproductive uses, a more difficult problem is presented by waste land —land that is rendered tintillable by swamps, ravines, rocks, slopes, etc., woodland that produces nothing salable, and pastures that are too poor to be profitable. Some areas are, of course, hopeless, and in that case they should be left out -of the reckoning altogether. Before this is done, however, it will pay to look into the possibilities of profitable reclamation. Many notifiable fields, for example, mav be turned into_ productive pastures, or if they will not grow enough grass to make this economical they can be used for the production of timber. On tlie other hand, it frequently happens that woodlots which yield nothing but a little firewood for home consumption are permitted to occupy valuable land. In deciding whether such lots should be cleared and tilled, the cost of clearing, the increased value of the cleared land, the interest on the investment, the salable value of the timber products, and the added expense for firewood which will follow the disappearance of the “tTm-~ ber must all fie taken into account. With unwooded areas, the advisability of bringing them under the plow may be determined by comparing the prob: able cost with the market price of good arable land In the neighborhood.

Obviously, the higher the price of land rises the more Incentive there is for the farmer to avoid waste in the utilization of it. It is significant, however, that investigations of the departmentof agriculture have shown that, irrespective of the price, tenants put a greater part of their land to productive use than owners. The tenant pays rent for each acre and he canqot afford to have any of them idle. On the other hand, the man who has no rent to pay may be able to get along on the produce of a part only of

the farm, and he is, therefore, more likely to overlook the potential value -of the part he wastes. By so doing he is, of course, throwing away opportunities to make money, but this is not always appreciated by those who have not grasped the important fact that the average'farm is too sinill for maximum efficiency and that in the majority of cases to increase the size of the farm business is to increase the profits from it. Those owners, however, who realizing this, are operating leased land in addition to their own, are, like tenants, careful to see that they pay for no loafer acres. • To anyone who is buying or leasing land, then, the important question is not “How much am I paying an acre for this tract ?" but “How much am I paying for the acres that are going to, work for me?" It Is calculated that a farm of 100 acres selling at SIOO an acre .will cost the purchaser actually slll.OO an acre if 90 per cent of it is productive and S2OO an acre if only 50 per cent of it is. As a matter of fact, the percentage of improved land in

by James S. Ball

farms east of the Mississippi is only 59.5 and .west of that river only 5-8. Improved land, however, it should be noted, is not always the same as productive land. A good timber lot, for example,-is not improved, but it may be highly productive; rmd-farm buildings and fences stand on land that is improved but produces nothing. In the final analysis, it is the amount of productive land that determines the earning capacity of a farm and that -should: therefore, xtetermlna its .pricein many cases land is given, over to use as pasture which will not sup* port sufficient - rtock td make any reasonable return on the investment. Such land properly belongs in the category of nonproductive land, in that it makes no return commensurate with the interest on the money invested. It should be borne in mind that the quality of th? pasturage in relation to the land value is an important consideration in . choosing a farm. For instance, what is economical pasture on liind that is worth $lO an acre might, on land valued at SIOO an acre be decldeffty; uneconomical. This relation should be carefully studied in buying a farm with much pasture land. To determine whether pasture land . i_s economical or not, practical data should be secured as to the-number of acres necessary to support one head of stock and the interest on the value of the land in question compared with the current charge per head of the same kind of stock.for a season’s pasturage. Or the estimated value of the return in increased value of the stock or its products may be used for comparison. By this means the relative economy of pastures may be detei\ mined.