114 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
That is a very practical businss question that to my mind is facing the 
farmers of this great state of Iowa. Down in my country they are getting 
$175 an acre for some of the land, and this thought has often occurred 
to me: Suppose corn ever does get down to 25 or 30 cents a bushel again, 
how many bushels an acre will we have to raise on an average to keep 
that land up to that price? That is a good, sensible, business question, 
isn't it? 
And then I think of the tremendous waste on the farm. But you say 
the farmers get along, and none of them fail, while 90% of the busi- 
ness men do; there is no occasion for w^orrying. But you are getting 
this land up where you have got to grow something off of it or it is 
going to come down, and that means a loss to you. There is no reason 
why the farmer should not be the most successful man we have. He 
has made more money than anybody else in the last ten years — that is, 
the farmer that has been up to snuff and attended to business. Of course 
he can always make a living, because he can dig it out of the soil; but 
no man ought to be content with making a living, and I think we are 
beginning to realize as never before that we are trustees of this soil 
and that we have a duty to posterity with reference to it. We are just 
reaching that point where we see the necessity not only of conversion, 
but of conservation. There have been great reforms going on all over 
this country in all sorts of business and all sorts of life during the last 
four or five or six years, and v/e are glad to see this great moral awaken- 
ing. With it of necessity comes this idea of our responsibility, and that 
responsibility has brought up this thought now of conservation of what 
we have. And so it is not only your duty to make a living off your 
land, but to hand it down to posterity (your heirs, if the lawyers don't 
get it) in such a condition that they can make a living off of it. 
I heard the distinguished secretary of agriculture say out on the fair- 
grounds during the last siate fair that there was as much nutriment and 
sustenance in a ton of corn stalks as in a ton of timothy hay. And yet 
I have sat on my porch and seen beacon lights all around the horizon 
every spring where men were burning up that precious corn stalk! You 
never go out into the country but what you are amazed at the waste that 
is going on constantly. How many of you straighten out your strings? 
How many of you take out the weeds from the fence corners? How 
many of you plow up close to the edge of your land? How many take 
care of the highway as you should? You are not the only law-breakers; 
many of us do the same thing; but nevertheless, if you stop to think 
of it, there is more waste on the farm today than in any other sort 
of business that men are engaged in. 
There is a way of overcoming all this, and I think it is a duty that 
a man owes to himself and his family and posterity to do it, I know 
when I tried my farming experiment we used to feel pretty well if we 
got 15 or 20 bushels of corn to the acre on the average, and now, with 
the modern methods of scientific farming, there is no excuse for a man 
not getting 70 bushels per acre off the good corn land of this state. Some 
day he is going to do it, and that will be when the boys are kept on 
the farm and made to feel that it is just as much of a science to farm 
as it is to go into the city and practice dentistry. 
