Three Acres And Liberty | Page 9

people to the country, that is the need."
But there is no such need. Man is a social animal, he naturally goes in
flocks, he earns more and learns more in crowds. To transport him to
the country, even if he would stay, which happily he won't, would be to
doctor a symptom. As in typhoid, what is needed is not to suppress the
fever, that is easy, but to remove the cause of it.
It is not the growth of the cities that we want to check, but the needless
want and misery in the cities, and this can be done by restoring the
natural condition of living, and among other things, by showing that it
is easier and making it more attractive to live in comfort on the

outskirts of the city as producers, than in the slums as paupers.
We know already that the natural and healthy life is, that in the sweat of
our faces we should eat bread. We observe that everything we eat or
use or make comes from the earth by labor; but no one knows how
abundantly the Mother can supply her children. It is well said that no
man yet knows the capacity of a square yard of earth.
The farmer thinks that he has done well if he gets a hundred and fifty or
two hundred bushels of potatoes from an acre; he does not know that
others have gotten 1284 bushels.
("Mr. Knight, whose name is well known to every horticulturist in
England, Once dug out of his fields no less than 1284 bushels of
potatoes, or thirty-four tons and nine hundreds weight (about 34
bushels to the ton), on a single acre; and at a recent competition in
Minnesota, 1120 bushels, or thirty tons, could be ascertained as having
been grown on one acre." P. Kropotkin's "Fields, Factories and
Workshops," page 114.)
Let us realize what an acre means. An acre is a square about 209 feet
each way, 4840 square yards of land. A New York City avenue block is
about 200 feet long from house corner to house corner. It has eight city
lots 25 X 100 in its front; about double that space (17-2/5 lots) makes
an acre.
An ordinary one-horse cart holds twenty bushels, so then a full crop of
potatoes from that space would fill 56 carts.
To raise potatoes as an ordinary farmer raises them, requires him to go
over the ground not less than a dozen times, plowing, harrowing,
marking, planting, cultivating, three times weeding, three times for
bugs, and digging; it would pay him to go over it much oftener.
If he plants his rows of potatoes three feet apart, to allow for horse
cultivation, he has 69 rows of 200 feet each; which makes him walk at
least thirty-three miles over each acre. If he has a twenty-acre lot in
potatoes, he walks each year more than 650 miles over the field and
gets, let us say, 150 bushels of poor potatoes per acre, or 3000 bushels
off his twenty-acre field.
Now suppose he cultivates the soil, instead of just "raising a crop," and
gets 600 bushels of fine potatoes to the acre, he need plant only five
acres, walk only 200 miles, and, because his potatoes are choice and
early, get many times the price that his pedestrian neighbor gets. It is

much easier to grow 200,000 lb. of feed on one acre than to grow them
on ten acres.
To cultivate is to watch the soil as you would watch your cooking and
to tend the crop as you would tend your animals. The crop is as alive as
the stock and as easily gets sick.
If an ordinary farmer rents 60 acres at $5.00 per acre, a moderate rent
for good land, he pays out in cash $300, besides farm wages. If he buys
it, his interest and taxes will amount to nearly as much; but if he tills
but five acres intelligently, he can get as much out of it as out of an
ordinary farm, and even if his rent be as high as $30 per acre for well
situated land, he is $150 to the good; besides, doing the work himself,
he has no drain of capital for wages.
Large barns and shelter for help being unnecessary, he can live in a
cheap shack till he accumulates enough for proper buildings. Many of
the successful vacant lot farmers live in a tent or in shanties made of
old boxes and such like.
Of course, if we have the knowledge and ability and the capital and can
give it the attention, it is more profitable to cultivate on a large scale
than on a small one, because in that case each worker necessarily
produces more than