COMMERCIAL FERTILIZERS FOR MAINTENANCE OF FERTILITY 103 



themselves against loss, have been obliged to charge high prices for their 

 goods. So long as the cotton only, was sold, and the seed was returned to the 

 land, the depreciation was slower. But of late years the great demand for 

 the seed in the manufacture of oil has led to many selling the seed outright, 

 imagining that they were making an additional profit from the crop. While 

 it is true that some farmers exchange their cotton seed for meal and oil to 

 advantage, there are thousands who sell them regularly. This is especially 

 true of the tenant croppers whose interest in the land is less than their inter- 

 est in the immediate crop. The oil, being one of the products of the plant 

 which was derived from the assimilation of carbon from the air, has no value 

 as a manure to the farmer, and where a fair exchange can be made, it is better 

 for the farmer to make the exchange and get the more readily available nitro- 

 gen in meal, while the hulls will make a good absorbent of manure. It 

 is true that they are largely used as food for stock, but they are at best only 

 a makeshift of the poor farmer, for there is not a section in all the cotton belt 

 where far better food may not be grown, while at the same time the crop that 

 furnishes the food will help the land. 



One of the saddest sights one sees daily in this cotton country is a farmer, 

 or rather a man who is cultivating the soil, hauling home from the city oil 

 mill, baled cotton seed hulls to feed his mules with. And this in a country 

 where the finest crops of the best hay in the world can be grown from the 

 cow pea, and the land made better for cotton production by reason of the 

 forage growth. The whole crop, seed and all, was sold, and now the farmer 

 buys back the poorest part of the crop to feed the mules. And this is not 

 the worst of the whole sad business, for the cotton must not only pay for the 

 mule feed, but for the mules themselves, for the idea of keeping a breeding 

 animal never seems to enter the minds of the men who are working in the one 

 crop of cotton; the cotton must carry the whole burden while the soil gets 

 poorer and poorer. I write of these things particularly because they are daily 

 before me, but there are farmers whose interest is in other crops, who are 

 doing as badly as the cotton farmers. We recently traveled and spoke at 

 Farmers' Institutes in the State of Maryland, in sections where the farmers 

 are improving in many respects, and are paying attention to stock and the 

 dairy, and over the wide, level fields where the corn binder could run with 

 profit, I saw the old time method of topping the corn and stripping the blades 

 still practiced, and the stalks and husks left in the field; thus sacrificing a 

 large amount of food that the shredder would have turned to profit in the 

 feeding of cattle. In the great corn growing sections of the Central West, 

 too, we see the same waste of food and lack of interest in the complete utili- 

 zation of the greatest forage crop of America, the Indian corn crop. There 



