The Bulletin. 49 



SOIL PRESERVATION. 



By E. E. MILLER, Managing Editor Progressive Farmer. 



Quite likely you have all heard the old story of the two men who were 

 traveling through one of those sections where the land, the crops, the build- 

 ings, the stock, the people all look as if the blight of insufficiency had fallen 

 upon them. Sitting in front of a dilapidated cabin in a particularly unpromis- 

 ing field was an old man who looked as listless and despondent as the scrubby 

 crops about him or the old, sad-eyed mule tied up by the pine-pole stable. 

 "Poor fellow !" said one of the travelers ; "poor, hopeless, poverty-ridden man." 

 The old chap overheard him and shifted his quid to the other side. "Lookee 

 heah, stranger," he drawled, "I ain't as hopeless and poverty-ridden as youall 

 think. I don't own none of this land about heah." 



That old man may not have been much of a farmer, but he was evidently 

 something of a philosopher, for there are thousands of farmers in this State 

 to-day who own land which is a burden to them rather than a help, which 

 decreases their profits instead of increasing them. Every acre of land that a 

 man cultivates that does not return enough to pay for the labor and expense 

 of making the crop, for the interest on the money invested in it, and for the 

 plant food removed from it by the soil, is an unprofitable acre— one which he 

 had better not have tended. And it is because we cultivate so many such 

 acres as this that there are so many farmers who work hard year after year 

 without getting ahead, whose only fate, it would seem, is to toil on and on, 

 with no reward for their labor except a scanty living and that long-deferred 

 hope which maketh the heart sick. 



The average yield of cotton per acre in the State of North Carolina last 

 year was 211 pounds. The average yield of corn has reached 15 bushels 

 per acre only three years in the last ten. Most of you, no doubt, made much 

 larger yields, but this means that other men made much less; means that 

 there have been thousands of acres of cotton making less than 150 pounds, 

 and thousands of acres of corn making less than 10 bushels. Were these acres 

 profitable acres? Did they add to the prosperity of the men who tended 

 them? Do they not tell, instead, of the misapplication of energy; of labor 

 that availed not, and of years of time literally wasted out of the lives of men 

 who should have been adding to the wealth and well-being of the State? 

 Farming will never be the profitable occupation it should be until we get rid 

 of these unprofitable acres. 



The great question is. "How are we to do this?" 



It is a question easier to ask than answer, too, because each acre is a dis- 

 tinct problem, demanding an individual solution. We frequently get letters 

 in our office asking how to make 50 bushels of corn, for example, on land that 

 has been making 20, or what fertilizers to use on a poor farm to make it pay. 

 I always feel sorry for the men who write these letters— sorry for them, in 

 the first place, because they are working land that does not produce crops 

 large enough to pay for the labor and money expended in their making (I have 

 tried that proposition myself, and know there is no fun in it) ; and sorry for 

 them, in the second place, because their questions tell so plainly that they 

 have no real idea of what they need to do. With such questions I always get 

 a glimpse in my mind of a farmer wearing himself out working land too poor 

 to make profitable crops, and probably leaving the land— as well as him- 

 self—poorer at the season's end than at the beginning. We laugh about the 

 pompous old planter whose land was so thin the stranger crawled over It on 

 his hands and knees because he was afraid it would break through if he 

 walked upright; but to the men who have to cultivate these poor soils they 

 mean hard work, poor homes, low standards of living, inefficiency ; to the chil- 

 dren reared upon them they are likely to mean deprivation, hardship, igno- 

 rance — the tragedy of unrealized aspirations and of thwarted development. 



October — 4 



