secretary's budget. 401 



EXHAUSTION OF SOILS. 



In discussing the exhaustion of soils the Rural New Yorker says: 



"No country was ever blessed by nature with more productive soil. 

 She made the best possible use of the long ages prior to the settlement 

 of this country by white men, in forcing the most luxuriant growth of 

 vegetation, and by its decay and that of the annual crop of foliage, had 

 filled the soil with an amount of fertility that seemed exhaustless. So 

 thought our fathers, and so think now many of the occupiers of the 

 great fertile West. But a continual taking out and putting nothing 

 back would exhaust even the ocean. It has exhausted the millions of 

 acres of the older East, and it will exhaust the most fertile fields of the 

 West. A study of the census must convince any searcher that the 

 production of all our crops is year by year growing less and less. It 

 can not be attributed to a change of seasons for a series of years, but 

 can be only to one cause — the gradual exhaustion of plant food by our 

 unthinking and unwise course. 



''The subject of husbanding the resources of our acres, and of 

 returning to our starving fields those elements of plant growth quite 

 or nearly exhausted, is yearly forcing itself more prominently upon 

 the attention of the farmers of at least the eastern half of our country ; 

 and the line is very rapidly extending westward. Millions of acres 

 that once produced magnificent crops of the various grains, even west 

 of the great lakes, are now lying vacant, or barely paying for the most 

 shiftless cultivation. The question cannot be seriously considered too 

 soon, even by farmers on the now rich and productive prairies west of 

 the great rivers. Every train that passes eastward is loaded with a 

 portion of their fertility, much of it in the crude, and barely remuner- 

 ative state of bran, oil meal, and the coarser grains, and, to the shame 

 of the farmers, even in the bones of their animals, while the returning 

 trains carry back nothing in the nature of plant food. 



"Though western farmers may think they have no need of such 

 knowledge, they should not fail to thoroughly post themselves, and 

 those farmers who do so, and who take advantage of this knowledge, 

 will, bye and bye, be looked upon as the 'lucky ones' who have the 

 richest farms in the vicinity in which they live." 



SUNSHINE. 



There is, indeed, one fact in the distribution of sunshme over the 

 •earth's surface that seems paradoxical. The farther north we go the 



HR— 26 



