246 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



In our present prosperity and abundance we almost forget 

 the latest famine in Russia ; can scarcely realize that much of the 

 time more people are hungry in India than live in the United 

 States; and will not remember tomorrow President Roosevelt's 

 call of today for help to relieve the wide-spread famine now exist- 

 ing in China. Meanwhile we go on, as a people, ignorantly, care- 

 lessly or wantonly robbing our soil of its fertility and American 

 posterity of a rightful heritage. 



Among all the nations of the earth, the United States stands 

 first in rapidity of soil exhaustion. The improvement of seed, the 

 use of tile-drainage, the invention and immediate adoption of labor- 

 saving agricultural machinery, the wonderful development of 

 cheap and rapid means of transportation, and the opening of the 

 world's markets to the American farmer have all combined to 

 make possible and to encourage the rapid depletion of American 

 soils ; until practical agricultural ruin already exists over vast areas 

 in the older parts of these United States, while it is common knowl- 

 edge even in the new rich states of the central west that the lands 

 that have been under cultivation for half or three-quarters of a 

 century are much less productive now than they once were. 



Farm manure always has been, and without doubt always will 

 be, the principal material used in maintaining the fertility of the 

 soil; but it is an unquestionable fact that the greatest source of 

 loss to American agriculture today is in the enormous waste of 

 farm manure. 



If corn were worth $1.05 a bushel, then the average annual 

 value of the corn crop of the United States for the past ten years, 

 including 1906, would be equal to the average value of the total 

 farm manure annually produced in this country. This statement 

 is based upon the careful estimates of the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, placing the average annual corn crop at near- 

 ly two and one fourth billion bushels, and the average value of the 

 manure annually produced from 20 million horses and mules, 61 

 million cattle, 47 million hogs and 52 million sheep, at more than 

 two and one-third billion dollars. 



The evidence is sufficient to fully justify the conclusion, and 

 practical observing farmers will all agree that at least one-third 

 of the manure produced is wasted on the average American farm. 

 If this is true, then the total value per annum of all commercial 

 fertilizers used in the United States (amounting to about 75 mil- 

 lion dollars) is equal to only one-tenth of the annual waste of farm 

 manure, This is no argument against the intelligent and profit- 



