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 or 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 coöperative 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 Roadtown
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 coöperative
features, such as creameries, hatcheries and nurseries that now
thrive under adverse conditions and will doubtlessly encourage the
development of others not now anticipated.
_Elimination of the Middleman._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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