No big post this week, I’m in the Maine Woods without reliable internet or electricity.

The one economics angle to all this is that like many seemingly ancient Maine forests, the one I’m in used to be a farm. Notice the barbed wire running right through the middle of a huge old tree; the farm was abandoned so long ago that the tree had time to grow that big around it.

Why was the farm abandoned? Maine is cold and our soil is rocky, so agriculture tends to be unproductive relative to the Midwest. Many people left their farms in the late 1800s and early 1900s for new land in the West or, more commonly, manufacturing jobs in the cities. Maine used to be half farms, but now its land is 90% forest.