The Bulletin. 71 



SOME FARMING PROBLEMS. 



Prof. W. F. Massey, of the Progressive Farmer. 



It is always my luck to come in when I am tired and the people are tired. 

 You have had so much good information given you to-day, and they have 

 stolen so much of my thunder that I do not know where to begin. I had pre- 

 pared a paper for this meeting on agricultural education, but I got to thinking 

 over the matter and thought that the farmers would expect me to talk about 

 farming. I decided that I would do just as the Congressmen do — when they 

 do not make a speech, they print it. I will print mine in the Progressive 

 Farmer. 



Now, Dr. Hopkins does not think much of experience ; but experiments make 

 up experience, and I have gained something from experience and something 

 from actual investigation. I have learned this in regard to our Southern 

 uplands : they naturally have less of this material which we call humus in 

 their original virgin state than the lands of the same character in the North, 

 where the snow has packed down the dead remains of vegetation and there 

 has been more accumulation than on our Southern uplands. The greatest need 

 of these uplands is the restoration of what they formerly possessed a-nd the 

 increase above the original amount of this humus or decaying vegetable matter. 

 We use this word to indicate the material containing a good deal of nitrogen, 

 the home of bacteria which make it a real living soil. Most of our long- 

 cultivated soils have been reduced to what has been called the old, dead 

 skeleton of sand and clay. The bacteria have been starved out because their 

 food has been used up, and the soil is literally dead. We have kept it exposed 

 to the sun, and nothing kills bacteria faster than sunshine. We have kept it 

 rid of humus or decaying organic matter, the remains of animal or plant life, 

 which would restore its fertility to that it had in the beginning. 



Our red clay uplands are the result of the decomposition of rocks already 

 there. Other soils are the result of deposits of decomposed rocks; but our red 

 clay soil is soil all the way down to the fast rock, if you can only get it 

 broken up and aerated. I have experimented largely with soil entirely devoid 

 of anything we would call humus — soil that has been washed off — and I have 

 gotten that into a very productive condition simply by getting it exposed to the 

 frosts of winter and to the air. 



How deep should we plow our land, some one asks. Well, I do not know how 

 deeply you should plow your land ; it depends on the character of the land. 

 But you cannot plow this red clay soil too deep if you are not in too big a 

 hurry about it. You must increase the depth gradually. You must get it 

 exposed to the oxidizing influence of the air. 



I took charge, about thirty years ago or more, of a large farm belonging to 

 the Miller School at Albemarle, Va. I was invited there to organize an 

 agricultural department in that school, and was expected to teach agriculture, 

 horticulture, agricultural chemistry, botany, bacteriology— in fact, I was to be 

 It. As a matter of recreation, I had a 1,200-acre mountain farm to improve. 

 And they wanted me to make a profit, too. I started in with fear and trembling, 

 because I had never handled such hills. I believed that the soil had been 

 wasted and washed by shallow plowing and the getting of too little of this 

 humus into it. They had been afraid to break a piece of land because it would 

 wash {\way. They kept it in poverty grass and kept cattle on it, and every 

 cattle track formed a gulley. I had a field that ran up a hundred feet as steep 

 as vou could use horses on. It was nothing but poverty grass. I started to break 

 this land with a No. 40 Oliver plow, three mules abreast of the plow. I turned 

 it carefully edgewise to keep it from washing so badly. I broke it IG inches 

 deep, including plowing and subsoiling. A neighbor said it would all wash 

 away and the field would be ruined. As a rule, if I were doing it now, I 

 would put on a winter cover crop ; but I wanted to get the soil mellow, and I 

 let it remain bare all winter, and watched it with a great deal of uneasiness. 

 But it did not wash. I had made a loose bed of soil in which the water sank. 

 I sowed it to grass and clover, and had the l)est field of grass and clover in 

 all that neighborhood, simply because I had gotten hold of something they had 

 not known there. I used phosphoric guano, very little different from ground 

 phosphate rock, and I got a remarkable growth of grass. The next spring I 



