No. 5. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 183 



PEOF. MENGES: I'm glad I'm not going to talk this morning. 



MR. SEEDS: So am I. After what the men preceding me have 

 said ; you can see how much is left for me to say. 



Buf to talk about the soil now, I don't know where to begin and 

 where to end. I have no manuscript and no notes; but yesterday 

 afternoon when I heard the gentleman from State College talk about 

 stock raising, and the blooded sire, and the different kinds of stock, 

 and what they could do with it, I said to myself: "You can figure 

 along that same line in anything you do." Wlien you want pure- 

 bred stock, you do not use a mongrel sire; and when you see a field 

 that is full of humus, there you have your pure-bred soil. I want to 

 tell you there are lots of things that you cannot do in stock rais- 

 ing, and there are lots of things we cannot do with the soil. There is 

 no man on the face of God's green earth that can take a razor-back 

 and make a hundred pounds of pork as cheaply as wtih a thorough- 

 bred. Down South, when they want to know whether a razor-back 

 is fit to kill, they lift him up by the ears, and if the body is heavier 

 than the head, he is ready to kill. 



In soil-making, as in everything else, each one has got to figure 

 out his own problem: 



"If all our joys and sorrows, 



Upon the line were hung. 

 And each would take the other's, 



We would all cry 'stung.' " 



Now, what we want to do is to ^et away from the mongrel form 

 of soil, and get into the blooded class. Now, I remember when my 

 grandfather hauled out the old manure and grew the biggest crop 

 between here and Nova Scotia. Why? Because he was working 

 the humus out of the soil; so was everybody else; and when the soil 

 was exhausted, then they moved on West and opened up the West. 

 They had worked the food matter out of the soil, and it was de- 

 pleted and would not produce any longer. So long as you have 

 humus, you can control the moisture, and you can control the heat, 

 and you can produce crops. I took that old farm when no one else 

 would have it, and I have no boy or girl that would want to leave it 

 toda}^ Why? Because I have put back the humus into the soil, and 

 made the old farm a fit place to live, and whenever I look at that 

 old place, and then hear some one say that farming does not pay, 

 I want to be shown; I'm from Missouri. 



Now, when I walk over a farm and see places where alfalfa grows 

 about four times as thick as clover or timothy, T say to myself, "Why 

 not put the whole farm in alfalfa?" And I have been going over the 

 country from one end to the other, telling them how God made the 

 soil. I started out to get up a lecture on "How to make money in a 

 purely scientific way"; but finally concluded that the best way to 

 teach the farmer to make money was to show him how to build up 

 his soil. The whole thing is to get a ten-dollar bill, and to get it 

 as cheaply as possible. I have four boys and two girls, and I have 

 always needed money. You cannot do much with fresh air and pure 

 water. I went back thirty years and T was the first man to advo- 

 cate spreading barnyard manure on the top. They fought me up 

 and down the country, and they fought me through the "National 



