HISTORICAL EESUME 33 



increased 21 per cent., the acreage of our farm 

 lands 4.8 per cent. In other words, the number 

 of mouths to feed has increased nearly five times 

 as rapidly as the source of our food supply, and 

 the country has been producing less per acre than 

 it produced ten years ago. 



We point to the abandoned farms of the East, 

 to the "Volusia soils " stretching from the Hud- 

 son Eiver westward across Pennsylvania into the 

 Ohio, an area of ten million acres, once fertile 

 soils occupied by fine old homes and barns, now 

 seemingly unfit for cultivation, and to the ex- 

 hausted cotton and tobacco lands of the South. 



Look at the reputed rich corn lands of Ohio, 

 Indiana, Illinois and Iowa, upon which less than 

 fifty years ago the writer has seen "King Corn" 

 lift his proud head twelve to fifteen feet in the 

 air, waving and rustling his rich green heavy 

 foliage with every passing wind, bearing his 

 heavy golden ears beyond man's reach, that meas- 

 ured to the husbandman eighty and one hundred 

 bushels to the acre, where now he sees him with 

 dwarfed and diseased body bearing his shriveled, 

 chaffy ears so near the ground that it becomes a 

 burden to gather them, ears that measure less 

 than a score of bushels to the acre. 



And this latter condition is not a limited one by 

 any means. You see it on thousands of acres, 

 and it applies to the growing of all crops. Crop 

 yields on these lands are growing smaller each 

 year; the area of worn soils grows larger and 

 larger; it is our nation's most vital disease which 

 has insidiously fastened itself upon our soils, and 

 like a cancer existing in the human body, "with- 



