FIFTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III. 187 



increase, but decrease, but we can increase our yield per acre. That is, the 

 right kind of man can do it — the corn producer that you asked me to talk 

 about. He will have to have a rotation of crops in the first place. You 

 can not keep on growing corn year after year on the same land, no matter 

 how good it is, because the Lord won't let you. He sends the red ant and 

 lice. 



Professor Holden has told you about the future corn producer, who is to 

 grow seventy-five or one hundred bushels to the acre, and how to select the 

 seed, and I regard his services as first-class. We are going to have better 

 corn than I expected this year, but not very good. People are replanting 

 their corn and I think many who brought seed from a distance are com- 

 plaining of short stands. It looks easy to get 100 bushels to the acre. It 

 is not so easy when one comes to grow 100 bushels of corn to the acre. It 

 is a groundhog case. Our land is getting up to $75, $80 and $100 an acre. 

 This price can not be kept up unless we put our brains in our corn work. Of 

 course you must have good, rich land. You will only get that by rotation. 

 You will have to do it. You must keep up the physical condition of the 

 soil. You are asking aboiit fertilizers. You grow clover, keep up as good 

 rotation as possible, keep your land in good condition physically and let the 

 other fellow fret about fertilizers. If you don't, your son will have to fret 

 about the same problems and you have left him a wornout land that should 

 be given to him with valuable fertility. 



Men ask what is good for impaction of the stomach and cornstalk disease. 

 It is another blessing that is sent to make you take care of what is given you. 

 You must begin to do it now. There is no first-class pork that is grown in 

 a corn-exporting country. It is all grown in corn-importing countries or 

 countries that do not grow any more than for their own consumption. Den- 

 mark has the finest pork in the market, and all the corn they have they 

 import from this country, and they use it wisely. Irish bacon is very fine 

 and you could not grow corn there to save your life. The nights are too 

 cold. While they use corn intelligently, you can scarcely go to an Irish 

 farmer who does not have American corn somewhere. So you find it in 

 Scotland. They use it wiser than we do. Corn-fed bacon is not the best 

 bacon, and when we give it to the markets of the world we must give more. 

 We must quit using so much corn. It is so easy to go to the crib and throw 

 out an ear of corn and the hogs like it so well that we keep feeding corn, 

 and at last we have hogs so short, and it is because we have fed corn year 

 after year. What we need to do is to grow fewer acres of corn and more 

 corn, and have pasture for our hogs. They need something else and I have 

 come to the conclusion that no man can raise hogs successfully unless he has 

 an alfalfa field. I am not alfalfa crazy. I don't say grow it for pasture for 

 cattle, or sheep, or for hay, but I do say that you ought to have a pasture 

 for hogs. This spring I wanted to kick myself off the farm because I did 

 not take my own medicine and did not do what I advised others to do — sow 

 an alfalfa field to put hogs into, and for a month we did not have pasture 

 we snould have had. Clover was late, oats and rape not big enough, and 

 alfalfa ten inches high and the' hogs reveling in it. 



I have seen hogs growing out in Nebraska fed on five pounds of alfalfa 

 and one pound of corn a day; brood sows through the winter that were bet- 

 ter lookers and had larger litters than brood sows kept here at three times 



