Page:Walter Renton Ingalls - Wealth and Income of the American People (1924).pdf/106

84 and $300 per acre. In the 10 years from 1900 to 1910 the average value per acre of all the farming lands in one Middle Western state, exclusive of buildings, more than doubled, according to the census, and then from 1910 to 1920 they more than doubled again.

“They more than quadrupled from 1900 to 1920— an average enhancement of more than 10 per cent per annum for 20 years. That is an extraordinary record. It is not strange that with such a rapid advance there should be some speculation, and that some persons should operate upon narrow margins, or that there should be some reactions and individual losses. Those developments happen in the stock market, in the grain market, and wherever there is speculation. They are incidental to a rapid movement of prices.”

It is questionable in my mind whether impoverishment of the soil did not cause the land that averaged $58.22 per acre in 1916 to be physically worth less than that in 1920. The soil of the country is constantly being washed away by meteorological agents, as witness the enormous volume of mud that is discharged annually into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River, and fertility is impaired by the extraction of potash, phosphorus, etc., by growing crops without adequate replacement. I read recently in a financial paper the comments of a factor in the fertilizer industry to the effect that “there are evidences now coming into view that the present growing cotton crop is showing the effect of under-fertilization. It will not be overlooked that within the present fertilizer consuming zone of the country agricultural production has reached its practical maximum except through the use of more fertilizer. It is probable that the fertilizer consumption