496 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



the winter, more or less. You must learn to grow grass, and hardly any- 

 body knows anything about that now. 



I was surprised when I was over in England this summer with Secre- 

 tary Wilson to find at a conference of some of the leading men of Scot- 

 land that it cost $50 an acre to put down a permanent pasture. I didn't 

 believe it, but on talking with about a dozen directors of the Highland 

 Agricultural Society there was only one man who put it less than that. 

 How do they do it? In the first place, they wasted their virgin fertility, 

 just as we are wasting it now; and they never learned how to farm until 

 they did waste it. Now they take a year to cultivate the land and clean 

 it, and then they fertilize it, and they sow 47 Vj pounds of grass seed 

 per acre, and they don't expect to turn it up for the next twenty years. 

 A tenant who would undertake to plow up one of those permanent pastures 

 would get into the same trouble that he would if he took the house off 

 or set fire to it. They are doing at that large expense what some of us 

 did at little expense. You all know that where there is a field in Iowa 

 or Illinois that is raw prairie — good rich land that grows bluestem — and 

 a man who had sense enough to sow blue grass on it and pasture it close 

 and let it stand for ten years, he has a pasture that will put fat on the 

 steers; and if he plows it up it will take him fifteen years more to get 

 back something like the fertility there was there. A pasture of that kind 

 is proof against drouth, frost and flood, and there is something in the 

 substance of that grass. It will keep a cow in the pasture for a year 

 without rain. We must learn to grow grass, so that an acre will keep 

 a thousand-pound cow seven or eight months in the year. I have done 

 it myself on small acreage, and it can be done. Then you will decrease 

 the cost of raising your baby beef. 



There are three grades of land in Iowa; one that will keep a cow to 

 the acre and fatten her without grain. The second is the kind that will 

 grow a stocker to the acre; and the third land that will grow a donkey 

 to the acre. We can never have the pasture land that they have in Scot- 

 land, because we haven't the even distribution of rainfall; but we can, 

 if we will at once put our minds to cultivating grass, double the yield 

 of our pastures, and when we do that we can laugh at the world when 

 it comes to the production of beef. 



The root of the trouble, to which I have referred before, is our 

 system of renting land. We are simply playing leapfrog over the state 

 of Iowa. There is hardly a man of you but would sell your farm if you 

 were offered your price. With the most of you it is not a home; it is 

 for sale. We have a great speculative mania in land, and as long as we 

 think there is some place better in Iowa we will never get down to real 

 business in this state. But when you conclude that there is no place 

 better or as good (unless it might be Kansas, if you take Colburn's 

 story for it, where you get sunbeams out of cucumbers), and settle 

 down and say that your place is not for sale, and won't be by your chil- 

 dren or grandchildren, and go to growing grass and reading Wallaces' 

 Farmer, studying night and day how to get all there is in the manure, 

 how to grow your cattle on roughage as far as possible, how to save 

 your waste, then we will do business. But we have got to get down 

 to the point that when you rent a farm you give a man an inducement 



