902 EXPERIMENT STATION RECORD. 



sources to a beneficial use which in the end exhausts them; but in 

 dealing with the soil and its products man can improve on nature by 

 compelling the resources to renew and even reconstruct themselves 

 in such manner as to serve increasingly beneficial uses — while the 

 living waters can be so controlled as to multiply their benefits.'' 



Mr. James J. Hill, in his masterly address on *' The Natural Wealth 

 of the Land and its Conservation," dwelt at some length and with 

 great emphasis on the evidences of the increasing exhaustion of our 

 soils under the systems of agriculture thus far practiced. '' There 

 are two ways in which the productive power of the earth is lessened : 

 first, by erosion and the sweeping away of the fertile surface into 

 streams and thence to the sea, and second, by exhaustion through 

 wrong methods of cultivation. The former process has gone far. 

 . . . Millions of acres, in places to the extent of one-tenth of the 

 entire arable area, have been so injured that no industry and no care 

 can restore them. 



" Far more ruinous, because universal and continuing in its effects, 

 is the process of soil exhaustion. It is creeping over the land from 

 east to west. . . . The richest region of the West is no more exempt 

 than Xew England or the South. The soil of the "West is being re- 

 duced in agricultural potency by exactly the same processes which 

 have driven the farmer of the East, with all his advantage of near- 

 ness to markets, from the field. 



" The average yield of corn per acre in 1906 was less than it was 

 in 1872. We are barely keeping the acre product stationary. The 

 average wheat crop of the countr}' now ranges from 12^ in ordinary 

 years to 15 bushels per acre in the best seasons. And so it is on down 

 the line."' 



He also pointed out the overshadowing importance of the conser- 

 vation of the soil. " I have dwelt upon the conservation of farm 

 resources because of the commanding importance of this industry 

 and because of its relation to our future. Nearly 36 per cent of our 

 people are engaged directly in agriculture. But all the rest depend 

 upon it. In the last analysis, commerce, manufactures, our home mar- 

 ket, every form of activity, runs back to the bounty of the earth, by 

 which every worker, skilled and unskilled, must be fed and by which 

 his wages are ultimately paid. The farm products of the United 

 States in 1906 were valued at $6,794,000,000 and in 1907 at $7,412,- 

 000,000. All of our vast domestic commerce, equal in value to the 

 foreign trade of all the nations combined, is supported and paid for 

 by the land. Of our farm areas only one-half is improved. It does 

 not produce one-half of wdiat it could be made to yield ; not by some 

 complex system of intensive culture, but merely bj^ ordinary care 

 and industry intelligently applied. It is the capital upon which 

 alone we can draw through all the future, but the amount of the draft 



