Norwich bulletin., 1911-10-28
STATISTICS NOT ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEM

(W ritter Specially for The Bulletin)
 There are in the United States, not ihcluiing Alaska any other outlying Portions, about 00.000.e00 acres Of tand of these nearly two billion acres kNI3.129, 900 acres are now actually III 4 farms. The department of agricul- ture estimates that only about ,ooV,- 1000 acres more are capable of cultl- vation." That would be 950,G00,O0 faeres. all told. This calculation, you I ssin obseHve, leaves almost a billion T acres-950 000, ,000-classed as incapa- : ble of cultivation. That is, an even half of our entire national area is set down as unfit for farming. What are chased as improved farm lands" amount to cniy 477,448,e00 acres; little over falf of the land actually owned in farms, and less than a quar- ter of all the land in the country.
 Perhaps you're not interested in fig ures. Mere talk about so many mill lions or billions of one thing or an- other isn't very thrilling, we must ad init. But it seems to me rather in terestng to know that less than a quarter of the land in the United States is improved" land: that only half is considered by those in author ity as capable of improvement; that for every acre which is now culti vated there are three uncultivated acres,
 
 gsrded as uncultiyata ble.
 Why. it begirs to look as if the calf had get about to the end of it's tetherl Can it be that we are so near the limit of agricultural expansion? Is there really ground for gloomy fore boding and fear that the time is al hand when we shall not be able to produce crops for our own needs? Let's see: What sort of land actually IS this half which is summarily dis missed as incapable of cultivatfon."?
 We'll, there's a lot of land covered with ponds and lakes and swamps, to begin with. It's perfectly clear that We can't cultivate ponds and lakes with blows and hoes and harrows. It Is NOT at all clear that many of them could not be made to produce Valua- ole food products in the way of fresh fish, if properly treated. Nor is the ice crop one wholly to be ignored Ice may not be actual food. but it helps 10 preserve fcod and prevent waste. m not so sure that even the lakes Dightn't be improved"
 As to the swamp lands, however, I protest against their being any of them set down as untillable and waste. It may cost too much. just now, to drain them and fit them for cultivation. But they are, ninety acres out of ev- cry hundred. reclaimable when the necessity arises and the demand for produce reaches an insistence which will make it pay to reclaim them. There is hardly a swamp in the United States which would be as difficult to turn into farm land as the sunlken basins of Holland. where thousands of fertile acres lie actually below the surface of the neighboring dyked-ou ocean.
 don't know how many acres of swsrrps there are in the country, but he rtf And we'll file a demurrer against their be- Ing ruled out of the count, to begin with. How about those cranberry bogs'' of Cape Cod and New Jersey. too Aud the rice swamps of Texas and Louisiana and Arkansas? And the Minnesota wire grass swamps? In these cases what used to be con sidered absolutely hopeless wastes are now more profitable producers than equal acresges of arabic land near by.
 No, thank you: we'll not throw our swaEips out of considerations at least not yet for a while.
 Another big area is classed as arid or semi arid land. The annual rain fall over parts of the extreme west runs al low as five inches-in fact. there are small areas where rain is never known to fall There is an inl- nlense country, taking in the western parts of Texas. Nebraska. and South Dakota, and practically all of New Me&lCO. ArIzOna, tOtOra0O, NeVada, Utah. Wyoming. Montana. Idaho and North Dakota, where the entire annual rainfall doesn't exceed twenty inches, just about half that to which we of Connecticut are accustomed. These lands a-e ciassed as "serni-arid' and were for years regarded as unsuitable for farming. But it has been found that they are simply superb for wheat growing. All the moister portions of these states arc now taken up, and the new arid farming" movement has shown that wheat and corn, etc, can he pfofitably grown wherever as much as ten or twelve inchss of annual pre- cipitst ton can be expected.
 Now 1t isn't by any means sure that the last word has yet been said aboup farming the desert. Forty years ago man would have thought of trying 70 crop crops where there wasn't rain enough in a whole summer to lay the dust. l. is done, now. And without irrigation, too. What do you suppose people will be doing the next forty years? Standing still and sucking