These farms are distributed all over the state, some in nearly every county.  In Sullivan County, for example, there are farms for sale ranging in price from ten to one hundred dollars per acre.  These can, almost without exception, be bought by small payments, balance on long mortgages, and it is wonderful how cheap they are.  In Ulster County thirty farms, some of which I have seen, are offered for sale at trifling prices.

Of course, many of these farms have been sold since the first editions of this book, and the prices have advanced, perhaps on the average doubled; but cheap automobiles have improved roads and have made others available that were useless ten years ago.  The development of the Southern states, with eradication of the cattle tick (the cause of “Texas Fever”) and irrigation and rotation of crops, has opened up new countries.  N. O. Nelson writes he has bought many Louisiana farms for his cooperative enterprise for about what the improvements are worth.

Cut over woodlands which we have learned to make produce incomes of about five dollars each year per acre by intelligent forestry, as well as swamp lands which we now know how to make healthful by drainage and by the extinction of mosquitoes, can still be had at low prices in New York and other states.  Numerous others are in the market from five dollars per acre up, and so it goes through the state, from Wyoming County in the extreme western end, where farms ranging from thirty to three hundred acres are in the market at from thirty to forty dollars per acre, to St. Lawrence County in the north, where land can be bought as low as fifteen dollars per acre.

When it is considered that these lands are within easy access to established markets with transportation and mail facilities, rural delivery, and telephone a proper idea may be formed of their value in opportunity.  The authority quoted further states that “probably fifty thousand agricultural laborers can find employment on the farms of New York at good wages.  Families particularly are wanted to rent houses and work farms on shares.”  Wages for new hands run from twenty to thirty dollars and upwards per month with board.  Men who know how to milk are especially in demand throughout the dairy regions.  These conditions make it possible for experienced farmers, although entirely without money, to get to the soil.

Over three hundred thousand aliens annually settled in the cities of New York State during some years in the last decade.  These people could be got out of the cities, where in normal times they are little needed, into adjacent country districts where they are much needed.

In the Real Estate Record and Guide, Mr. A. L. Langdon says:  “It is most remarkable that there are on Long Island, within from thirty-five to seventy miles of New York, thousands of acres of land which have never been cultivated, which have for years produced nothing but cordwood, and which the owners allow to be overrun with fire almost every year.  A large part of this land has soil two or three feet deep underlaid with gravel.  The best water in the world is abundant and the climate is more equable than on the mainland, and in each locality where any reasonable effort has been made to cultivate the soil, it has produced plentifully of all fruits and vegetables which can be grown in this latitude.”