236 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



wheat lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas down to half the yield 

 of these old Maryland soils. 



Years ago, when wheat had fallen from the inflated price after 

 the Civil War to fl.OO a bushel, I was traveling on a Chesapeake 

 steamer to one of the best wheat growing counties of Maryland, and 

 in conversation with a farmer, he said that they would have to give 

 up wheat, for it could not be grown for $1,00 a bushel with any 

 profit. At that time, and by the old methods of farming with the 

 annual use of complete fertilizers, they rarely made over 15 bushels 

 per acre and generally less. Since then that same farmer, and many 

 others in the same section have grown wheat at a greater profit for 

 less than a dollar than they did when it was higher. Conditions 

 required better farming, and the farmers rose to the conditions and 

 succeeded. One of my oldest friends in that section, who died a year 

 ago at the ripe age of 86 years, and was an enthusiastic farmer up 

 to his death, told me two years ago that thirty or more years ago, 

 like all his neighbors, he was farming in the old way and spending 

 a great deal of money for complete fertilizers and made 15 bushels 

 of wheat per acre and often less. But that for the past twenty 

 years, by the adoption of a short rotation and close attention to 

 clover, he has averaged 40 bushels of wheat per acre, and 50 bushels 

 had been made in the neighborhood, and that during that time the 

 only commercial fertilizer he had bought was plain acid phosphate 

 for the wheat that cost him an average of $9.50 per ton, and his 

 corn crop had gone up from 40 bushels per acre to 75 bushels. 



Recently certain alarmists in Europe have been prophesying dire 

 calamity to the world by the failure of the wheat crop from the ex- 

 haustion of the supply of nitrate soda and other sources. They 

 claimed that there would be a wheat famine all over the world if 

 some new source of nitrogen was not discovered. Most of these 

 statements were evidently for the purpose of booming the newly 

 discovered source 'of nitrogen in calcium cyanide. But these Mary- 

 land farmers found years ago what I have been trying for a genera- 

 tion to impress on the minds of farmers in all parts of the country, 

 that in any ordinary grain farming, the farmer who buys artificial 

 nitrogen in any form is wasting his means for something which he 

 can get without cost, and can even make a profit in the getting. 

 Market gardeners whose crops have a special value and need early 

 forcing can alford to buy nitrogen, but the farmer whose interest 

 is in grain production need never buy an ounce of nitrogen in any 

 form, if he farms right. 



Professor Hopkins of Illinois recently said, ''As a matter of fact 

 at least 99 per cent, of the crops of the world are being produced 

 without the use of commercial nitrogen and without artificial soil 

 inoculation, and where abundant use is made of the legume crops in 

 rotation, it will be possible in all future years, as it has been dur- 

 ing the thousands of years in the past, for farmers to maintain a 

 sufficient supply of nitrogen in the soil without the purchase of any 



artificial nitrogen There is more nitrogen in the atmosphere 



above every quarter section of land than is required for the entire 

 annual corn crop of the world, and while bacteria work for nothing 

 and board themselves, living on the roots of the legume crops and 

 transforming free atmospheric nitrogen into combined forms for 

 the use of growing crops, there is but one conclusion to be drawn in 



