228 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



to buy them. You have got to buy your potash, your phosphate, that 

 you extract from the soil in every crop you produce. I want to say in 

 reference to the purchase of fertiHzcrs, that in my opinion where your 

 soils are beginning, as they are on every farm where crops have been 

 taken off to produce less and less, owing to the diminishing of the plant 

 food in the soil, that I favor using some fertilizer. I have found, by ex- 

 perience, that ground rock phosphate is the best fertilizer that can be 

 employed on my farm. It is a mnieral element; you cannot get it from 

 the air nor through any plant. You have got to go down to Tennessee 

 or I'loritla to those phosphate deposits. I was down in Florida last 

 winter, and I am sorry to say that Germany has bought up an immense 

 deposit of this mineral clement and is cutting a channel right through 

 the reefs for a mile or two to reach this rock phosphate bed, and it 

 is being shipped by the ship load over to that country. When all our 

 phosphate beds are exhausted, what are we going to do for mineral 

 fertilizers? So, gentlemen, it behooves us to preserve what we have 

 got of iJie mineral elements, which we cannot extract from the air as 

 we can nitrogen by growing cowpeas, alfalfa or clover, or some other 

 leguminous crop. That is a point I am anxious to impress upon every 

 farmer here. That is why I urge dairying; that is why I urge stock- 

 raising of all kinds; feeding everything upon your farm and returnmg 

 the fertility taken from it to the soil; and not exhausting the soil and 

 leaving it worn out, as has been done in Virginia, or Maryland, or the 

 New England or southern states. We must not wear out our soil here 

 in that way ; we must not be so selfish as to get every dollar we can 

 out of the farm and leave it bankrupt ; if we do, what will become of 

 our posterity? 



I might talk to you a great deal more about raising horses and 

 raising colts, about breeding them. The great law is, as I have stated, 

 that like produces like or the likeness of some ancestor. There is a 

 great deal in that "some ancestor." That is why pedigree is essential. 

 Sometimes an animal will be produced like an ancestor which existed 

 four, five, six or even ten generations back. I have known of 

 horses that have been marked like their ancestors six generations ott, 

 even to glass eyes, when none of their progeny had been marked in this 

 way before. This law of breeding is a most mysterious law — hence, 

 you want pedigree. You want to know the history of the 

 generation preceding the animal which you breed from. You 

 want to be very careful. If you are going to marry you are careful. 

 You study the history of the family with which you are going to unite. 

 You want to know whether the men have been of good character, and 

 whether the women have been of good character ; whether there has 



