262 MEADOWS AND PASTURES 



6 to 10 tons of hay to the acre. Afterward some plowed their 

 alfalfa fields and planted them to wheat, to potatoes. Herein was 

 seen a miracle, the wheat yielded as much as 75 bushels to the acre 

 and the potatoes 600 bushels. There was now nothing wrong in the 

 soil, it was complete in its fertility and producing power. Whence 

 came this increase? What had happened to that soil? 



"What had happened was simply one of God's miracles, one of 

 the things that God had planned when He made the world, no doubt. 

 Nitrogen He knew must be in soils, must be in foods, the air was 

 full of it but not in such form that plants could absorb it, so the 

 legumes, the clovers, were planned to store soils with nitrogen. 

 Alfalfa is a clover, a vigorous, long-living clover. Alfalfa leaves 

 are as unable to absorb nitrogen as are the leaves of other plants, 

 so were designed little living organisms called bacteria, especially 

 fitted to digest the nitrogen that is in the air digest it and assimilate 

 it and dying to turn it over to the plants. So the marvelous produc- 

 tivity of the Idaho desert 'soils is based on their large content of 

 carbonate of lime, that and the fact that they are permeable by water 

 and air and have enough phosphorus, potash and other plant foods. 



"Those farms of Idaho are sure of a splendid destiny. They are 

 rich in mineral elements of fertility and because of that the alfalfa 

 can for thousands of years be counted on to bring to them their 

 nitrogen. One knows well that there will ever be a land of fertile 

 fields and great crops in that wide, western valley, that never fear 

 of hunger will be felt between those ranges of snow-capped moun- 

 tains as long as the river flows peacefully through canals and loses 

 itself in cool depths of alfalfa or wheat or between rows of apple 

 trees, pink and white with bloom or gleaming red with apples in 

 October. Seventy-five bushels of wheat to the acre grow in Idaho, 

 600 of potatoes, while in the eastern states wheat yields from 8 to 

 20 bushels and potatoes in good years up to 150 bushels. Near 2,000 

 miles of railway haul to bring food from Idaho to New York, and 

 within driving distance of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and 

 Washington one finds abandoned fields growing up to pines and 

 bushes! Why do we not develop fields near at home? To irrigate 

 that land in Idaho costs from $50 to $100 per acre, here are fields 

 on which God makes rain fall in gentle showers all through the 

 crop season. What is wrong in the East? 



"First, let me say it is not the men that are wrong. They are 

 as good men who inhabit the infertile farms of the East as the men 



