ROADTOWN AGRICULTURE.
Market gardens near our cities are worth several hundreds of dollars
per acre. But there are millions of acres of land more fertile than a
Brooklyn market garden that cannot be used because there is no way to
get fertilizer to it or products away. Transportation is more important
to land values than fertility.
A modern city of a hundred thousand inhabitants is about six miles in
diameter, within “an air line” mile of the edge of that city will be
about twenty square miles of land, but this land will average three
and one half miles from the markets which are usually clustered in the
center of the city, but if the street system is of the checker-board
type, the edge of the city between the compass points will be five
miles by street from the markets.
A Roadtown with a hundred thousand inhabitants will have within a mile
of its house line “edge,” or “center,” two hundred square miles of
land area, ten times as much as in the above case, and this land will
average but half a mile from the market to which the gardener must
needs transport his produce, which is only one-tenth the distance under
the present day conditions.
Another advantage of Roadtown for intensive agricultural development is
that, because of the numerous other functions that transportation is to
serve, Roadtown agriculture has a perfected system of transportation
immediately at its service to say nothing of an immense consuming
population on the line.
The first impression of a casual reader when Roadtown agriculture
is mentioned, will be that reference is made to the play-farming,
chrysanthemum and chicken breeding indulged in by suburbanites. On the
contrary, though suburbanites living in Roadtown will undoubtedly play
at farming much to their physical and mental betterment, we are here
speaking of the agriculture that will be the leading industry of the
fully developed Roadtown.
The trouble in grasping the possibilities of Roadtown agriculture
comes from the difficulty of renouncing our old viewpoint. The typical
farmer with his house in the middle of a quarter section of land,
half of which is fallow, and on the other half of which he carelessly
grows food for live stock of which only 6 per cent of the nutriment
is recovered in the form of meat, will be inclined to make light of
the idea of farm houses being built touching each other. On the other
hand the city dweller, especially of the older Eastern cities, which
were located chiefly in reference to navigation and are more likely
to be surrounded with water, swamp, rock and sand than by soil, find
that when the little remaining land has paid toll to railroad and coal
yards, millionaire villas, and deer parks and land held by speculators,
who discourage its agricultural improvements, there is little remaining
to give one the picture of the close proximity of the consumer and the
food supply.
In spite of the previous bias of these two viewpoints, those familiar
with the possibilities of intelligent agriculture will see nothing
strange in the prediction that the farmer of the future will live next
door to the “city” consumer of his wares.
_Sufficient Land to Support Population._
In the first place, the locations of Roadtown will be through districts
where there is little loss through uncultivatable soil. With twenty-one
foot houses, there would be almost two and one-half acres per family
for each mile one goes back from the Roadtown line. Thus within a mile
(counting both sides) of the house line will be five acres per family.
But in no section of the Roadtown will all the families be engaged in
agriculture. In typically agricultural sections of the country to-day
about one-third of the population live in villages and towns. This
population is composed of retired farmers, traders and professional men
who serve the farm population. In Roadtown civilization this population
would live in Roadtown lines. Near cities the commuting population
and everywhere the manufacturing population who are only engaged in
agriculture on a small scale, or not at all, will release more land
for the Roadtown farmer. If the proportion of agriculture to other
enterprises is the same as in the country at large, the area available
to the support of an agricultural family within a mile of Roadtown will
be about twelve acres.
But we have limited our calculation to land within a mile of the house
line--why? Evidently for argument’s sake only, for there is no other
reason. In the country districts children frequently walk two or two
and a half miles to school. The average distance from the post office
is three or four miles. The average haul to the railroad, five to
seven. The average distance to the other good things of civilization
is so great that the farmer doesn’t go at all, he is often referred
to as a “Hayseed,” unsophisticated, civilized to the extent of the
civilization that can be shipped by rail and be hauled home in a
wagon. The Roadtown will pour into the farm home all the luxuries and
refreshments of civilization at its best. In return it brings him
a new problem in the relative location of his home to the land he
cultivates. The result will be a wonderful rearrangement of the whole
scheme of agriculture. The land, whether owned by private individuals,
the Roadtown corporation or the Federal government, will be cut up into
plots, larger and larger in size as the distance from the Roadtown
increases.
Next to the house on both sides will be plots or gardens about the
width of the house, and probably partitioned from the neighbor’s by
trellises of vines or hedges of shrubbery. These plots will be of
sufficient depth to give ample privacy to one’s doors and windows.
These front yards--there are no back yards or back alleys in
Roadtown--are but the outdoor part of private homes, and will perhaps
be devoted to shade trees and lawn on one side, and to garden stuff on
the other. Though these yards in Roadtown etiquette will be strictly
private as far as an outsider’s presence is concerned, they will still
be within easy view of promenaders on the roof, and for the same reason
one is not allowed to dump rubbish on the front stoop in the city, the
Roadtown yard will be under the general oversight and supervision of
the Roadtown landscape gardener.
Beyond the private gardens will be vegetable gardens, then chicken
yards, greenhouses or pigeon flies. Beyond these in larger plots will
be berry patches and coarser vegetables, and then orchards and dairy
barns and pastures, and farther still, grain fields, and beyond that,
forests.
The distance back which land will eventually be tilled by farmers
living in the Roadtown, is a matter on which I hesitate to express my
opinion for fear it will discredit the worth of my judgment in the
minds of those who have given the matter no thought, but I think I can
carry the points by examples: Imagine yourself to be a farmer of the
future, and accustomed to the luxury of civilization; suppose you wish
to raise flax as a main crop, and breed pigeons and grow dew berries as
side issues. The pigeons and berries you could have at a few minutes’
walk from your Roadtown home. The flax would require your attention,
plowing and seeding a couple of weeks in the spring, and harvesting
again a week or so in the summer. Would you prefer to go five miles
to that field every day for fifteen or twenty days, or even take a
tent with you and go twenty miles and camp there, and for the rest of
the year enjoy the coöperative and waste eliminating features of the
Roadtown home life, or would you live in a frame house on the land and
wash your face in cold water and get up winter mornings to start a
fire and drink impure water from a polluted well and make your wife a
kitchen scullion, isolated and lonely, and send your children two miles
through the storm to an inefficient country school?
Two of the most immediate advantages of the Roadtown for agriculture
are heat and water for lawns, greenhouses and gardens. How far this
water service can be extended from the Roadtown main will of course
depend upon the nature of the supply. But it has been abundantly proven
that water for irrigation, even in the most moist sections of the
United States, was a wonderfully profitable investment. Sewage will
find a special use as fertilizer as before mentioned, and the Roadtown
garbage disposal works will doubtlessly have a residue for the land.
Horse manure as a fertilizer is gradually vanishing from industrial
life, and the Roadtown will eventually depend upon the chemical
fertilizers, “green manure” crops, and from the animals upon the land
for fertilizer.
The distribution of fertilizer as well as the receipt of heavy freight,
will require a freight station located about every quarter or half
mile. The opening of the ground for access to the tracks will disturb a
yard or two which will lessen the rental value of the house above, just
as the rental value of thousands of city houses have been diminished by
the presence of elevated roads. In practice such locations in the house
line will doubtless be used for some of the numerous non-residential
purposes for which room will be occasionally planned to suit the local
conditions.
Transportation will enable the better development of coöperative
features, such as creameries, hatcheries and nurseries that now
thrive under adverse conditions and will doubtlessly encourage the
development of others not now anticipated.
_Elimination of the Middleman._
The markets of Roadtown can hardly be compared to present conditions at
all. Where the farmers of to-day go to the railroad station with their
produce, Roadtown farmers will leave theirs in the warehouse of the
food department. The 25 to 75 per cent of the price that now melts away
between the producer and consumer will of necessity be divided between
the producer and the consumer.
The Roadtown, either through its central coöperation or in the form
of individual citizens will be a great consuming market for the
Roadtown farmer. Certain products, however, for which the locality is
especially adapted must necessarily be sold outside the Roadtown. For
such, salesmanship coöperation as is now carried on in the Ontario and
California fruit belts and in the creameries of the Middle West and
trucking districts of the South will be brought into play, and with
the Roadtown transportation system and storage warehouses its farmers
will surely not fail where the former have succeeded.
_Coöperative Ownership of Farm Tools._
Well managed coöperation will also find another field in Roadtown
agriculture in the form of coöperatively owned tools. I fully believe
in the electric plow, for instance; an invention which the writer
worked out some years ago in the form of a flexible cable which would
unwind from a cylinder on the plow as the plow moves out from the
electric plug, and will rewind as it returns. Such a device as I
propose is entirely practicable and has simply failed to be developed
because of lack of cheap electric power near the land to be cultivated;
however, the old reliable horse will be used back from the Roadtown
line and as near to it as he proves economical and desirable.
The use of electricity for agricultural power, is a part of the future
programme of the world as the land becomes more thickly settled and as
land to raise horse food gradually diminishes. How fast the change will
come will depend upon how rapidly the storage battery and the means of
conducting electric power are cheapened through invention. At present
the electrical truck competes successfully with the gasoline truck,
and Edison storage batteries are now replacing the horse cars in New
York streets where the traffic does not warrant the regular electric
car. I believe the most economical agricultural conveyances in Roadtown
will in a short time, if not from the outset, be light electrical
storage wagons and that the use of such vehicles as well as electrical
cultivating instruments will gradually extend back from the Roadtown as
intensive agriculture develops and electric power is cheapened.