The population of the United States is out of balance—too many consumers in cities—too few producers in the country—with a steadily increasing food shortage and higher cost of living in consequence. The annual production of food from the 5,000,000 acres owned by the national government, and intensively cultivated by the Homecroft Reserve, would tend largely to reduce the cost of living. It would aggregate more than half the value of the entire annual production from all the farms of the United States to-day.
That would, however, be but a small part of the stupendous enlargement of the economic power of the United States that would result from the work that would be done by the National Construction Corps to increase the area available for food production, and enlarge the productiveness of lands already under cultivation. The great works that would be built by the Construction Corps of the Reclamation Service would accomplish:
(a) The utilization of the waters of eastern streams for increasing the annual production of between 150 and 200 million acres by supplemental irrigation in the humid and sub-humid sections of the country;
(b) The reclamation by irrigation of at least 75 million acres of land now desert in the western part of the United States;
(c) The reclamation by drainage or protection from overflow of 75 million acres of swamp and overflow lands situated largely in the eastern and southern states.
A total of 150 million acres of worthless deserts and swamps would be reclaimed and devoted to food production. That would be equivalent to the actual creation of an area of that enormous extent of new lands where none had been before, and these new lands would be the most fertile and highly productive of any lands in the United States. If the annual gross production of the 150 million acres of reclaimed deserts and swamps were put at only $60 an acre, which is a low estimate, it would amount to $9,000,000,000 a year, and the world needs the food. The value of all the wealth produced on farms in the United States in 1910 was estimated by the Secretary of Agriculture to have been $8,926,000,000.
The application of supplemental irrigation to lands in the United States already under cultivation by rainfall, as is done upon large areas in France, Spain and Italy, would double or treble the production of farm crops on such lands. And if 100,000,000 acres of those lands were intensively cultivated and fertilized, as is now done on much of the land devoted to truck-gardening on the Atlantic coast, the gross food production from every acre intensively tilled in that way can be increased more than $1,000 a year. That would mean an increase in the food supplies of the United States aggregating an annual total of one hundred billion dollars a year.
These figures look so large as to seem visionary to those who are uninformed as to the facts, but it is only a question of multiplying units of from one to five acres into which the land would be subdivided for tillage by Homecrofters. With a population of 100,000,000 to feed now, and the practical certainty that it will be 200,000,000 in another fifty years, and 400,000,000 within a century, shall we hesitate to train the Homecrofters who would each produce a gross yield of more than $1,000 from every acre to feed our multiplying millions?
If we do not train millions of our people to be Homecrofters and intensive soil-cultivators, how are we going to feed our population when it reaches 200,000,000 or 400,000,000?
All we need to do, to be sure of having at least 100,000,000 Homecrofters, each producing $1,000 worth of food from a one-acre-garden home or Homecroft, when our population has grown to 400,000,000 within a century, is to graduate 1,000,000 Homecrofters every year from the Homecroft Reserve Educational System as is in this book advocated and shown to be entirely practicable.