30 THE LURE OF THE LAND 



all of his horses at the beginning of the plowing season 

 and keep them at the plow for twelve hours a day, and 

 feed them by turning them out to pasture at night. 

 Apparently he would be getting very economical serv- 

 ice ; in reality he would be destroying his motive power. 

 For this reason the man born on the farm is likely to 

 begin his new farming career with the handicap of the 

 bad training he has already had. 



Proud of the fact of his early experience, he will 

 doubtless proceed again to put it into practice. It was 

 a bad practice economically in the beginning. All the 

 fertility which Nature had stored up for thousands of 

 years, was at the disposal of the extensive farmer. 

 Usually he has succeeded, in from twenty-five to fifty 

 years, in exhausting all this accumulated supply. This 

 is instanced by the well known fact of the rapid de- 

 crease in fertility of the virgin soils of the country. 

 Whether they originally were wooded or prairie, the 

 same result is seen. Some of the deeper and more fer- 

 tile soils last longer, but the shallow and rolling soils 

 rapidly succumb. It is far better, therefore, while still 

 being proud of the birth on a farm, to forget all else 

 except that one fact in resuming agricultural activities. 



" Book farming is deceptive and misleading, and the 

 book farmer is doomed to failure." The above state- 

 ment is both true and false. Book farming is apt to 

 exaggerate the good points and minimize the difficulties 

 of scientific agriculture. This is especially true of of- 

 ficial bulletins, both national and State. The law 

 should require that all failures should be as carefully 

 recorded as successes. A book on farming which would 

 feature the failures as prominently as it did the suc- 

 cesses would not be a misleading book. 



It must not be forgotten that the chances of the old 



