DAIRY, SEED IMPROVEMENT, STOCK BREEDERS^ MEETINGS. 3II 



make things better. Don't you? If you cannot help to make 

 the world better, you ought to go where you belong. I do not 

 know where that is. 



Let me say another thing. There is no man in this world 

 who can help to make things better more than the farmer. He 

 can help to do more to make this old world better than any 

 other fellow, because he is not tied down to anybody, unless he 

 has a mortgage on his farm. He is independent and once in 

 awhile he can say what he wants to say and think as he pleases, 

 and you know a lot of them do. This is true among the Dutch, 

 and they say it in Dutch, too. 



I say there are two classes O'f farmers, the constructive and 

 the destructive, and nine-tenths belong to the destructive class. 

 You would like to have me tell you who are the constructive 

 and who' are the destructive farmers. Our soils are made up 

 of two substances — organic matter and disintegrated rock; the 

 one comes out of the atmosphere a'nd the other out of the 

 earth. When you and i raise these crops on the farm we should 

 do as the Almighty did with the woods, which produced a crop 

 of leaves every year and which fell on the ground and rotted 

 away and, by and by, the trees themselves died, rotted away 

 and went bac'k to the soil. When we came along we cut away 

 His agency of soil making — the trees; and then we began 

 farming. We began to raise crops and we did not put back into 

 that soil as much as we farmed out of it, did we? The de- 

 structive farmer is the man who does not put as much organic 

 matter back into the soil as 'he takes out of it. The construc- 

 tive farmer puts more organic matter back into the soil than he 

 takes out and that fellow is working for a permanent agricul- 

 ture. This is what the Almighty did. The longer he farmed 

 this land the richer it became. 



The problem 'before the American people is to work for a 

 permanent agriculture ; commercial fertilizer will not do it, nor 

 any other agency but the crops grown on the farm. I use com- 

 mercial fertilizers to help me to get to the point where I will 

 not have to use it, or to supply something in which my soil is 

 naturally deficient. Another thing we do on these farms ; we 

 raise soil-exhausting crops and soil-improving crops. The 

 longer we raise one kind the poorer our land becomes, and the 

 longer we raise the other kind the better our land becomes. The 

 Almighty did not leave us in ignorance about these things ; He 



