No. 7. DEiPARTMiENT OF AGRICULTURE. 625 



old gray-bearded men said to me, 'That's all right for you fellows 

 in Iowa, but we don't want it here. You can run your corn experi- 

 ments, and do these things there, but our peojile are too conserva- 

 tive; our people are not as sensational as they are in the west. Joe 

 Wing, here, who does things with alfalfa, he came here and tried to 

 get us to do them, too, but our people went ahead in the old way and 

 forgot all about it.'' 



Indiana had averaged from 35 to 38 bushels per acre, which was 

 not large. La Porte county on the north, and one of the hardest we 

 have for growing corn, had this year 60,000 acres of land in corn. 

 They had got in some parts an average yield of 38 bushels per acre, 

 and on the hard clay soil they had a% average of 32 bushels per 

 acre, and thought they raised their full share. We went up to La 

 Porte county and increased their yield to 50 or 60 bushels per acre, 

 and then they said they were making money, and they saw their 

 land increasing in value, and they were satisfied. 



But we wanted to raise the yield in that county, so we decided to 

 get the boys interested. There are several banks in that county and 

 we went to the bankers and induced them to offer prizes to the 

 boys to arouse their interest, and the boys undertook the work, and 

 their yield astonished some of those people. W'hy, one boy had 

 an average of 114 bushels per acre. Then more boys came, and they 

 raised each one acre of corn on the sand hills, and the clay 

 banks, and the marsh lands of La Porte county, and at the meeting 

 on December 14th. 8,416 boys reported. One bo}', in low marsh land 

 that was sold two jeavs before at |5 per acre, raised 119 bushels of 

 corn of 70 pounds to the bushel. A boy of 18 demonstrated to the 

 people of La Porte county something that they had never attempted 

 before. The president of the school district gave a sworn statement 

 that the average of those boys was over 84 bushels per acre. Well, we 

 needed more money to continue our experiments, and I went up there 

 one morning, and a man interested in the Legislature took me around 

 in his automobile, and within a few hours we had secured all we 

 needed. It is just a little matter of getting what you want. That 

 is all there is about it. 



They became interested up there; and then the question came up. 

 ''Can we afford to raise beef cattle on 100 acres of land?" and I 

 heard farmers say that they could not raise cattle on 100 acres of 

 land; they needed it all for corn. And once, when I presented this 

 report of La Porte county, one old farmer said, "Could I take care 

 of 40 acres of land the same way that boy took care of his one acre?" 

 I said, "No. sir; cut it in half, and take care of twenty acres, and in- 

 stead of 35 bushels an acre, you will have 75. Turn the rest into 

 grass, and in a few years that old farm will be worth more than you 

 ever saw before.'" 



The question is how to get more corn off the same land, and the 

 thing is how to do it. That is what you want answered, and that 

 is what we want to answer. The first thing is, to get the variety of 

 corn that is best suited to the soil and locality. Many of us, through 

 ignorance, have allowed our land to run down to the point where it 

 will not produce corn any more, and others have through hard work 

 brought up the standard of corn, but they still lack in production. 



40—7—1906. 



