42 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



only in the fact that the surface soil has accumulated humus from the vege- 

 decay, and, by being exposed to the action of the oxygen of the air, has been 

 brought into a condition in which it more readily gives up to plants its store 

 of food. 



The original source of the humus in the soil was the natural growth on 

 the land. Nature does not like bare ground and she soon covers it with some 

 sort of vegetation. Among the grass and weeds the seeds of trees find lodge- 

 ment and grow, and soon a forest is formed. The trees send their roots down 

 deeply into the soil, and then scatter their leaves on the surface to gradually 

 decay, year after year forming more and more of the black decay, and increas- 

 ing the fertility of the soil. 



Then, after a while, some one comes along and cuts the forest down, and 

 begins to cultivate the soil. He finds it fertile and productive, and he goes 

 right along cultivating it in the same crop year after year, and it grad- 

 ually becomes less and less productive, till finally it is abandoned, to grow up 

 once more in grass and weeds and once more be taken by nature for a new 

 forest. Then, on the soil which was called worn out, but which was simply 

 rendered unproductive by bad treatment, nature, by her unaided forces, with 

 no fertilizer but that which she gathers from her own bosom, makes a grander 

 growth than the man who wasted the soil ever grew. And she repeats the 

 same process that formed the soil in the beginning, bringing up from deep 

 down in the subsoil matters for the growth of trees, and spreading it year 

 after year on the surface. Then another fellow comes along and makes fire- 

 wood out of this second forest, and goes to work to reduce again the soil 

 made fertile by the forest. He succeeeds sooner than the first, for the accumu- 

 lation is more recent and lighter. But this man cannot afford to throw the 

 land out and clear another piece as the first possessor of the soil did. 



So he begins to dribble a little commercial fertilizer on it to induce the 

 soil to yield him crops to sell. He does this year after year, and keeps culti- 

 vating the land in cotton or corn or wheat, as the case may be, and he wonders 

 that the land seems to grow poorer and poorer, and the farmer gets poor too. 

 But let him stop in despair, and nature will grow a grand crop again on that 

 land without calling in the aid of the fertilizer man. Of course, we cannot, 

 in our modern agriculture, adopt the methods that nature does exactly. 

 Life is too short for a man to wait for the forest to grow and enrich a piece 

 of land for him ; he must get the same results in a far quicker manner. Get- 

 ting a hint from nature's methods, we can do all that she does, and do it in 

 a very brief time compared with her work. That the soil has not been ex- 

 hausted as was thought, is shown by the fact that the forest grows readily on 

 this land when it is left to its own resources. It had simply declined to give 



