74 STATi: POMOI.OGICAI, SOCIETY. 



scratch the soil. You have got to work hard for it. I own a 

 farm of ninety acres of abandoned land in New Jersey. The 

 farm I live on takes care of fourteen people. It was a farm on 

 which a mortgage was foreclosed before I took it. Three fami- 

 lies failed on that farm. Why ? Because they did not recognize 

 that the land had lost its character. I almost lost faith when I 

 saw that land. I went up and looked it over and remembered 

 my experience with the Southern cow pea. I plowed the ground, 

 broadcast the peas, plowed them in, and the next thing we were 

 beginning to see the character of that soil coming back. It 

 came back by leaps and bounds and we are able to grow corn 

 by using the cow pea where even rye would not grow. 



A farmer I know said to me, '*! want you to look at that wheat 

 and tell me if you can't find a little tract that is a little better 

 than the rest !" I went into the centre of the field — a blmd man 

 could have told the different^e. I asked, "What have you been 

 putting on, 'J^'"^ Jones' phosphate?'" "No, sir, I plowed in 

 there a crop of Southern cow peas, two years ago." There is 

 not an abandoned farm that cannot be brought up by the use 

 of the cow pea, clover and lime. These things will do it for you, 

 I know it because we are doing the same thing in New Jersey. 



It is a great honor for you to make such an exhibit of apples 

 as you show here. My business takes me everywhere and I see 

 all these exhibitions, and with one exception I have never seen 

 a better display of first-class apples than you have here to-day. 



Where you can produce such apples as these, where you can 

 put them on the market as you do, there is no country on the 

 face of the earth that can compare with you in the production 

 of fine apples. Think of your advantages in regard to the 

 market, how you can reach these markets and control them f 

 The day has gone by when you can produce forty or fifty bushels 

 of potatoes to the acre and make it pay. It will not pay you 

 to raise rye as you used to do. If you stick to your fine vege- 

 tables, your apples and fruit as your principal products, you will 

 always have a ready market for them. In the face of the fact 

 that science is telling us how to redeem these old farms, he 

 \vlould be a strange man who would say that Maine agriculture 

 is doomed and there is no chance for him here. 



As the white is coming into my hair and as I begin to realize 

 that perhaps my best day's work is done, I feel surer if I can 



