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............