148 CLOVER CULTURE. 



We desire to reiterate what has been said in preceding 

 chapters, that the most complete exhaustion of the soil, para- 

 doxical as it may seem, majr be accomplished by the use of the 

 clovers. If by supplying- nitrogen in the clovers and continu- 

 ally drawing on the potash and phosphoric acid, which the 

 clovers do so largely, the farmer practically exhausts the land 

 of these, he must then either resort to expensive commercial 

 fertilizers or throw his land into the hands of mother Nature 

 to nurse it back through long years, or it may be centuries, 

 to the condition to which as a foolish and unskillful cultivatoi 

 he has found it a fit subject for his robberies. 



The Western farmer has now reached a point where, 

 willing or not, he must elect to do one of three things : 1. 

 Continue his present robbery of the soil by continuous grow- 

 ing of grain for sale in the world's markets and thus selling 

 his land by piece-meal. 2. He may by supplying nitrogen in 

 the clovers and returning nothing in the form of manure rob 

 it more completely and reduce it to a more hopeless barren- 

 ness. 3. He may draw on the winds of heaven by means of 

 the miracle-working tubercle in the roots of the clovers, and 

 then by the judicious use of the manure made on the farm in 

 various ways restore the potash and phosphoric acid, trusting 

 to the gradual disintegration of the rocks of which the soil is 

 composed to keep up indefinitely their supply. 



The folly of the first course is as supreme as it is con- 

 spicuous. The farms all over the West that have been rented 

 on one-year leases to croppers attest that folly so completely 

 that he 4 'may run that readeth it," and "the way-faring man, 

 though a fool, need not err therein." Heretofore millions oi 

 the best acres in the West have been cultivated by farmers 

 who confessed themselves pilgrims and strangers, and like 

 Abraham of old, though in a far different sense, said they 

 were seeking a better country and would find it as soon as 

 they had, to use their own expression, "skinned" or "taken 

 off the cream" from the lands they occupied. These are the 

 soil robbers who plant neither orchards nor groves, around 

 whose homes are no flowers, on whose porches are no vines 

 to shade their wives from the summer's sun, and who expect 

 as soon as their robberies are completed to find in the farthei 

 West another piece of virgin land to despoil. It is time foi 

 this class of farmers to understand that the limit of the corn 

 lands of America has been definitely marked out, as fixed by 

 their Creator; that these lands are all out of the possession. oi 

 the Government and are nearly all in cultivation, and thai 

 while there is a large amount of wheat lands as yet untouched 

 by the plow, they are in capricious and uncertain climates, 



