374 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



thus prevail upon him to be less exacting with the tenant and more 

 considerate of the land. Under such conditions it is bound to mean 

 that the landlord will either receive less immediate return from 

 the land or he must give more attention to the tenant's method of 

 farming and work out a system which will be both remunerative 

 and soil conservating. This latter system requires knowledge on 

 the part of both men and skill on the part of the tenant. It also 

 requires an entirely different viewpoint from that of the non- 

 resident landlord who simply expects a certain per cent on his in- 

 vestment, too often with no thought of the effect upon the land, 

 or of the effect upon the tenant himself. 



It is not to be expected that many landlords will be able to 

 give either the time or thought to a system of farming through a 

 tenant which will maintain, the land and the landlord's profits. 

 The thing that will generally happen will be that in order to pre- 

 vent the continued wearing of the soil they will begin to insist 

 upon the tenant practicing certain conserving methods. This is 

 already evident in many parts of the corn belt, where leases are 

 drawn with the understanding that the land is to be rotated 

 through a certain crop rotation, or that the crops are to be fed on 

 the land, or that clover is to be grown with more or less regularity. 

 These are among the first things to suggest themselves, and they 

 are all good. It must be understood, however, that such restric- 

 tions placed upon the tenant do not usually allow him to make the 

 profits which he otherwise would make. This simply means that 

 the landlord must become more lenient. 



Personally, I feel that a genuine interest in the tenant and his 

 welfare is the duty of the landlord, and that we shall never pro- 

 gress very far toward bettering the conditions for either our ten- 

 ants or our soil until landlord and tenant work together. With the 

 increasing value of farm lands, together with their decreasing pro- 

 ductiveness, it is coming to be more and more necessary for land- 

 lords to adopt a viewpoint which will allow their tenants somewhat 

 greater privileges, while they at the same time require systems of 

 soil building from them. Where a man is holding land for specu- 

 lative purposes, he can rarely afford to have it run down, and the 

 man who sees to it that the land is maintained will usually make 

 a greater return in the end than the man who, through extreme 

 requirements on his tenants, causes them to greatly reduce the 

 productivity of the soil, thus materially decreasing its market 

 value. 



