234 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



another crop. But our twenty bushel crop completely exhausted 

 the acre with little or no humus left in the soil, the winter rains 

 begin to wash the field, it is cut into big and little gullies to be 

 mowed over next year to the jarring and straining of machines 

 going over the rough field, with a mere apology at best for a hay 

 crop, consisting of tall woody white top weeds, short clover, what 

 is of it, and little short headed sickly timothy, with little or no 

 nutriment in such strained grass crops. When the man has a barn 

 factory on his farm he can fatten a crop, just as he can fatten 

 poultry or swine. Well fed crops, feed stock; you can't feed the 

 ti^immings of an apple orchard and get a big fiow of milk, it is 

 simply out of the question for the general farmer to talk about 

 prosperity till his field grows from four to eight tons of hay to 

 the acre. I would not be bothered with a one crop eastern farm, 

 it is only a nuisance and an expense. But when a farmer gets 

 into the manure and butter factory business he can just practically 

 own a second farm by setting one acre under the other. If he 

 by his system of farming makes his soil from four to five inches 

 deeper, and it is much cheaper for him to do it than go and buy 

 a farm alongside of the one he has, for it will only take him half 

 as long to work his double acre farm as it will to work his two 

 acre farm, and he will get more from his double acre than he will 

 from his two acres. 



This was my plan to make my few acres double, triple and quad- 

 ruple their crops so that I would have a farm equal to three or 

 four times its real size. It was in this economy of land and labor 

 that the small farm worked out the practical results so satisfac- 

 torily. I manured, plowed, harrowed and cultivated an acre to get 

 as much as grows on three, four or more ordinary acres. The ex- 

 pense to plow an acre is only one third as much as when three 

 have to be plowed, then too when the weather is just right it takes 

 less time to seed an acre than it does three or four. So that every 

 fact is in favor of the acre solving the question of the market both 

 in respect to outlay and income. But there are farmers buying 

 bag manure to grow crops as they will call it, let their mows empty, 

 silos half filled and their barn is an unused factory, simply storing 

 a few loads of inferior crops, and the acre at most is dusted with 

 about a half grain of fertilizer to the square inch and no humus. 

 Is it any wonder that farming does not pay? This is the unfortun- 

 ate kind of farming for the acre and the owner — then talk against 

 the farm paper, the Institute lecturer and agricultural college, as 

 being book farming; wh}^ there could be no worse system, of 

 farming than that which robs the acre and impoverishes its owner. 



The legume crop which is extolled so highly for nitrogen and 

 humus is all right as far as it goes, but suppose scarlet clover 

 sown in corn will give an increase the next year in corn of fifteen 

 bushels, that a field that yielded twenty-five bushels of corn per 

 acre, when seeded to scarlet clover at the last working of the corn 

 grew forty bushels per acre. I don't call that business farming; 

 it's true there is a gain of fifteen bushels, but suppose the scarlet 

 clover had been fed to live stock and the manure cared for, both 

 solid and liquid, and taken to the field, the farmer would have 

 just as much manure and the manure in a much better shape for 



