218 ANNUAL, REPQRT OF THE Off. Doc. 



and they have practically disappeared from the tables of those who 

 need such articles of food most or have been replaced by articles 

 of an inferior quality and wholesomeness. Nevertheless, the breed- 

 ing and selection of seed from the most vigorous and prolific plants 

 and the improvements of our strains of both dairy and beef cattle 

 has and will help to solve the problem of providing for an increas- 

 ing population and a mope fastidious people. This work must be 

 more vigorously prosecuted in the future than it has been in the 

 past. It must also be extended along all lines of agriculture and 

 animal husbandry that the maximum resuUs from it may be ob- 

 tained. Intensity of cultivation and care has increased the produc- 

 tion of many farms many fold, oven on some of the so-called "worn 

 out' lands. Likew'ise some of the farms which have been abandoned 

 because of so-called "soil exhaustion" are now producing phenom- 

 enal crops. Only last season I saw corn growing to a height of 

 twelve feet on what a few years before was called "worn-out" land, 

 and actually abandoned for several seasons because truck crops 

 would not grow on it. The rotation of crops has, where practiced, 

 proved to be of inestimable value in maintaining and increasing the 

 yields received from the soil. Thus, this practice more generally 

 followed W'ill help to answer this important question. The intro- 

 duction of new^ crops suited to our many different soils and our 

 varying climate and the growing of crops adapted to tie different 

 soils and climatic conditions are points of fundamental importance 

 in increasing our national production and maintaining our com- 

 mercial position among the powers of the M'orld. 



With the practical application of the adaptation of not only crops 

 to soils but of the different varieties of the same crop to soils comes 

 the necessity of a close study of the characteristics of each and 

 every different soil, not alone by the scientist, but by the tiller 

 of the soil, the farmer himself. Not only the soil but the different 

 methods of cultivation and soil management must be studied in 

 order that we may follow that method which produces maximum 

 results at a minimum expenditure. When these adaptations of 

 crops to soils, these methods of handling the different soils, etc., are 

 definitely worked out and practically applied in our systems of agri- 

 culture, we may reasonably expect an increase in production far 

 greater in value than the cost of the effort expended in their study 

 and investigation. 



In the utilization of our soil resources there are certain things 

 which we must keep in mind. 



In the first place a warranty deed gives us possession of and the 

 right to use land from the surface downward to the center of the 

 earth and the air from the surface upw^^rd as high in miles as we 

 can imagine. Yet in spite of these legal rights we find, more often 

 than "once in a while," farmers who plow and till as though they 

 owned only the surface few inches of soil and none of the air above 

 the soil, and certainly the harvest on many farms shows that the 

 husbandman has either forgotten his rights to enough soil for a 

 proper seed bed or has been negligent in some other essential. Last 

 fall I saw a farmer plowing and evidently he w'as of the opinion 

 that his deed only called for the surface three inches of soil, for 

 that was the depth which he was turning the sod. I will wager 



