Excerpt from Soil Conservation It is not strange, therefore, that in many communities exploitive farming continues beyond its legitimate life. In fact, such a change could hardly proceed in the older settled States while the unbounded West Offered the renter and the farm laborer the Opportunity to acquire a home by gift from the Government, on soil fertile enough to permit, for. One or two generations, profitable farming with little equipment other than energy and courage. At the same time, the nation as a whole did not suffer from the depletion of the soil in the Older States, for the reason that increased production on the rich soils newly brought under cultivation in the West kept pace with'the ever increasing demand for food. Hence it was that the decrease In the agricultural population and the abandonment of a large part ofthe land formerly tilled in the Eastern States attracted little attention. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.