SEVENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK-PART III. 75 



made his campaign up and down through New Jersey his soldiers fre- 

 quently passed through this section and it was from this farm and 

 others near by like it that his soldiers were fed; so that you will see 

 this farm was producing grain and wheat at a time when all you had 

 here were large herds of buffalo, with nothing but Indians for proprietors 

 and hired men, and yet with nearly two centuries of crop production, I 

 may say that this farm today is producing more than it ever did before — 

 more in potatoes, wheat, corn and grass. It will grow 300 bushels of 

 potatoes to the acre, over thirty bushels of wheat, and from two and a 

 half to three tons of hay. One year with another these fields will pro- 

 duce nearly as large a yield in corn as you do here in Iowa, while, of 

 course, the stalks are worth much more than they would be with you. 

 You naturally ask, how has this been done? How can this be done after 

 200 years of production? The use of chemical fertilizers in connection 

 with clover sod and such manure as the farm produces, is responsible 

 for this condition. Every year there will be produced $500 worth or 

 more of chemical fertilizers, particularly upon the potatoes, and one 

 year with another this ninety-acre farm will yield over $3,500 worth or 

 more of farm products. I don't believe there is an average farm in Iowa 

 within reasonable distance of a market that can beat or even touch it; 

 yet this is only a fair sample of what we, in the East, can do with com- 

 mercial fertilizers. You will understand that I don t give this as an 

 argument that your men should begin to use fertilizers, for it seems 

 evident from your crops and the appearance of your soil that you do not 

 yet need them. I merely show you how, after two centuries of hard 

 cropping, these fertilizers enable us to keep up our farm crops. Another 

 illustration is that taken from Maryland. On the peninsula between 

 the Atlantic and the Chesapeake Bay there is a stretch of dry, sandy 

 land. To your eyes it would be worth little, except as material for mak- 

 ing concrete; and yet, before the Revolution, that land and others like it 

 produced vast crops of wheat, which were sent to Europe to help feed 

 the people. During the French Revolution we sent ship load after ship 

 load to people in France and probably saved the French republic. This 

 kind of farming in Maryland developed a class of gentlemen farmers. 

 They had their 500 acres or more of land and slaves did the work. Go 

 through that country today and you will find the ruins of a lot of old- 

 time mansions, scattered up and down through the State, which were 

 built on the proceeds of this wheat growing. Your country ruined this 

 business. The cheaper grain and the wheat from the West came into 

 the East at such prices that these gentlemen farmers could not compete, 

 with their use of fertilizers and expensive methods of labor. They 

 abandoned the business and in many cases the land started back to the 

 wilderness. Now, strange to say, wheat growing is again coming up as a 

 profitable enterprise in this section. The western land is largely used 

 up, since the population has grown and the price of wheat has risen, and 

 many of the modern methods enable the Maryland farmer to produce a 

 bushel of wheat cheaper than he ever did before. So strange is the de- 

 velopment of society in this country that I may say only the other day a 

 great Maryland farm that has gone down through generation after gen- 



