This development has helped hold down the cost of buying plants, but overall home gardeners are not well served by these outlets. To begin with, the salespersons working in them don't know much about gardening, and, since they usually commute long distances to work, they know even less about local growing conditions. So you're rarely going to get any good gardening advice from them. In the second place, the selection of plants offered by these outlets tends to be extremely limited. Finally, the plants are never of high quality and they are not well adapted to local conditions.
Land erosion is a bigger problem today in the U.S. than it was in the past.
Land which is ploughed erodes more quickly than land that isn't ploughed. These facts show why erosion is so much more serious today than it used to be. Free immigration to the U.S. before 1914 benefitted the immigrants who came here, and it also benefitted the people already here. The immigrants benefitted because their new standard of living was higher than it had been in the countries they came from. Those already here benefitted because the immigrants provided additional labor and markets for U. S. industry.