2G2 ANNUAL RErORT OF TH^ Off. Doc. 



J see it coming— all taritts olT farm products, and they are going 

 to leave taritls on everything we buy. We are a set of fools if we 

 allow it. 1 don't want to be led into a larilf question, but I have 

 to show your chairman there is something up here (indicating his 

 head) inside, if there isn't very much outside. 



PKACTICAL METHODS OF POTATO GROWING 



By E. A. ROGERS, Brunswick, Maine 



Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Brother Farmers of Pennsylvania: 

 J esteem it an honor and a privilege to have this opportunity to 

 come before you and talk on any agricultural subject, especially 

 the one which 1 have made a personal study of since boyhood — the 

 growing of potatoes. We, in the East, are on the threshhold of bet- 

 ter times for the farmer. The last generation has seen eastern 



agriculture at its worst. 



There are reasons for this which I sometimes think we overlook. 

 If we go back a few years to the close of the Civil War when men 

 of all nations were invited to come to this country, and were prac- 

 tically given free farms in the great fertile West, coming as they 

 did by hundreds of thousands, taking up that fertile soil and com- 

 ing into direct competition with the farmers of the East, the re- 

 sult was harmful to both the eastern and western farmers, as it 

 forced the latter into a soil-robbing s-ystem of farming, not based 

 on any scientific principles, and could not help but result in the 

 depleted soils we now find in the West. At the same time the in- 

 flux of agricultural products from these western farms crowded 

 down prices here in the East so that there was but little, and in 

 many cases, no protit left to the eastern farmer on his harder worked 

 soils. The eastern farmer, after years of struggle to make both 

 ends meet with the low prices prevailing, lost the high opinion of 

 his calling he ought to have until it has become almost second 

 nature with us farmers here in the p]ast to cry down agriculture. 

 This has forced our boys to leave the farm, especially through New 

 England, and I presume that this is true also of Pennsylvania. 

 Time is changing conditions; the western farmer, who for years 

 sold fertility from his land in the form of grain, now finds his fields 

 depleted of that fertility far beyond anything he believed possible, 

 and he has now reached the same point that we here in the East 

 have, that is, he has got to be a soil-builder instead of a soil-robber, 

 and from now on the East and West stand on an equal footing as 

 regards soil fertility. 



This means a new era to the agriculture of the East; we can now 

 talk to our boys of the money that can be made in farming and no 

 longer tell them that if they ever expect to become well off they must 



