ing, drainage, or irrigation, but a much larger part can never be used for agricultural purposes. The acreage of improved land in farms constitutes a somewhat better index of the agricultural development of TABLE 1.-POPULATION, FARMS, AND FARM PROPERTY IN THE UNITED STATES: 1920 AND 1910. the country than does the total farm acreage, though much of the unimproved land in farms, including a part of the woodland, serves a useful agricultural purpose as pasture for live stock. 1 A minus sign (-) denotes decrease. $22.83 $13.22 $9.61 72.7 7.15 15.93 2.64 4.51 170.8 10.29 5.64 54.8 Population residing outside of incorporated places having 2,500 inhabitants or over. Towns in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were included with incorporated places in making this classification. The rate of increase in the rural population between the two censuses is affected somewhat by the fact that certain places classified as rural in 1910 had become urban by 1920. The population in 1910 of the territory classified as rural in 1920 was 48,779,082. For this territory, the increase in population between 1910 and 1920 was 5.4 per cent, which percentage indicates the rate of growth of the rural population, leaving out of consideration the changes in classification of territory. Decrease in land area due to the building of the Pathfinder and Shoshone Reservoirs in Wyoming and several reservoirs for irrigation projects in Montana. Less than one-tenth of 1 per cent decrease. • These figures include the value of fences, tile drains, and other incidental improvements on the land, excluding only the value of buildings. As compared with the figures for 1910, the number of farms reported for 1920 shows an increase of 1.4 per cent, the total farm acreage an increase of 8.8 per cent, and the acreage of improved land in farms an increase of 5.1 per cent. The greater part of the net increase in the number of farms, together with nearly all the increase in farm acreage, was reported from states lying west of the Mississippi River. In fact, the aggregate increases in these states were greater than the increases shown for the country as a whole, being offset to a considerable extent by decreases in the older agricultural states of the North. With the exception of Wisconsin, all of the states in the area lying east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio showed a decrease in the number of farms, while all the states lying west of the Mississippi River, except Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and New Mexico, showed an increase in the number of farms. It is apparent, in general, that most of the increases between 1910 and 1920, both in the number of farms and in the farm acreage, took place in those sections of the country where there were still considerable areas of new land to be taken up and made into farms. Much of this new land, as a study of the detailed tables will show, was of relatively low quality, and much of it was returned as unimproved land, with the result that the percentage of farm land improved in 1920 was lower than in 1910. The distribution of the increases and decreases in farm acreage among the several states is indicated in Table 2. The first section of this table shows those states in which there was an increase in farm acreage between 1910 and 1920, arranged in order of the |