102 EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 



The keynote of Mr. Hiirs address was the maintenance of soil fer- 

 tility as the rightful heritage of posterity. The necessity and far- 

 reaching importance of doing this was enforced as it rarely has been 

 before. In a striking way he showed the fundamental dependence 

 of all industry upon the soil, the source not only of food, but of wealth 

 to support manufactures. "All the life that exists upon this planet, 

 all the development of man from his lowest to his highest qualities, 

 rest as firmly and as unreservedly upon the capacities of the soil as 

 do his feet upon the ground beneath him.'' All industry must stop, 

 he explains, when the products of the soil are not forthcoming to 

 furnish the money for the pay rolls. 



He characterizes the soil as " the one unfailing national resource, 

 . . . the sole asset that does not jierish because it contains within 

 itself, if not abused, the possibility of infinite renewal." But he 

 points out that in utter disregard of these facts the waste of this 

 treasure '' has proceeded so far that the actual value of the soil for 

 productive purposes has already deteriorated more than it should 

 have done in five centuries of use." He quotes the late Professor 

 Shaler as saying that " of all the sinful wasters of man's inheritance 

 in the earth, and all are in this regard sinners, the very worst are the 

 people of America," and shows that nowhere is this reckless disregard 

 of future needs exemplified in a more marked degree than in the 

 treatment of our soils. " There is," he says, " except in isolated and 

 individual cases, little approaching intensive agriculture in the 

 United States. There is only the annual skimming of the rich 

 cream, the exhaustion of virgin fertility, the extraction from the 

 earth by the most rapid process of its productive powers, the deteri- 

 oration of life's sole maintenance. . . . Except in isolated instances, 

 on small tracts here and there farmed by people sometimes regarded 

 as cranks, and at some experiment stations, there is no attempt to deal 

 with the soil scientifically, generously, or even fairl}^" 



The effect of this depletion of fertility is illustrated by the statis- 

 tics of production and the low return in money value from an acre 

 of land. He points to sections where everything has been taken away 

 and nothing given back, and where, owing to the wasteful methods, a 

 condition has already resulted in which " agriculture as an indepen- 

 dent industry, able in itself to maintain a community, does not exist." 

 He shows that while the yield of wheat in the favored wheat-produc- 

 ing areas in the Northwest has fallen from an average of 25 bushels an 

 acre to 12 or 15 bushels, the production of other countries has steadily 

 increased and fertility been built up at the same time. " The French 

 nov/ draw from the soil more than five times as much wealth as they 

 did a century and a half ago." 



Some startling figures are presented to show the inadequacy of our 

 present production in the face of a rapidly increasing population. It 



