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.
91 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 the92 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 two93 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 manufacturing94 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 the95 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 yard96 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 or97 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 co?perative 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 roadtown98 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 co?perative features, such as creameries, hatcheries and nurseries that now thrive under adverse conditions and will doubtlessly99 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 co?peration 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 co?peration 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 the100 roadtown transportation system and storage warehouses its farmers will surely not fail where the former have succeeded.
co?perative ownership of farm tools.
well managed co?peration will also find another field in roadtown agriculture in the form of co?peratively 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 depend101 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.