Observations on Missouri Agriculture. 407 



the commercial fertilizer applications, and the systematic methods they 

 employ in green manuring are a revelation to the average American. 

 One gets the impression that after all that has been said about the 

 American farmer, he is still a novice in handling his soil. And one's 

 mind reverts to the central west farmer, growing corn after corn until 

 the soil will no longer produce a remunerative crop, then sowing to oats 

 and grass in order to allow a sufficient rest to the land that it may pro- 

 duce more corn crops, yet with the tendency ever downhill. I, of course, 

 realize that this practice is by no means universal, even on our better 

 American soils, yet many farmers still follow it. I realize, too, that 

 where such a practice is followed the farmer liimself may not be to 

 blame. His knowledge of better methods may not be sufficient to enable 

 him to change, his finances may make a diff^erent system impossible with 

 the knowledge he possesses, or, lastly, his soil may be still sufficiently 

 rich to make this very profitable. But surely this exhaustive system 

 is not a proper one if one can avoid it. It is too often the result of 

 a desire to get all one can out of the land, regardless of the future. And 

 it is largely because of such methods that the average yields of our crops 

 are approximately half those of Germany, for instance. The other day 

 a German who had heard that in America the wheat was headed and the 

 straw left on the ground asked me how we managed to turn under so 

 much straw. I told him that the men who did this in America were not 

 bothered, as a rule, with too much straw. This shows the idea of the 

 German whose conception of a wheat crop is a real one, and not a half 

 crop, as is so common with us. I may say that the average wheat yield in 

 Germany is 26 bushels per acre against 13 bushels in the United States. 

 Incidentally, this incident shows the distorted ideas that most European 

 people have of American agriculture. They seem to think of it as an 

 agricultural paradise where every farmer is wealthy, where the farms 

 are all domains, and where every other shower is a shower of dollars. 



The matter of soil culture is also far better understood here than in 

 America, and when one sees land turned sometimes three times between 

 crops he wonders why. He also wonders how they find the time, especial- 

 ly when, as is so often the case, in Germany particularly, the exasperating- 

 ly slow-moving oxen are used for the purpose, and a plow which we 

 should call antiquated. But the methods followed are those which long 

 experience has shown best for this or that soil, and while I do not mean 

 to say that our economic conditions would allow of anything like the 

 same methods, yet the thought which conies is, what a little attention most 

 American farmers give to the physical conditions of their soils and how 

 important it is that one should study the principles of proper soil tillage 



