COMMERCIAL FERTILIZERS FOR MAINTENANCE or FERTILITY 105 



which the development of the productive character of the Southern uplands 

 must be slow ; is the keeping of cattle and sheep, and the growing of forage 

 crops for their feeding in a profitable manner. "But," said a cotton farmer 

 to the writer, when he was urging the feeding of cattle as the very foundation 

 of profitable farming, North or South, "I do not want to be pestered with 

 cattle, for I can buy a lot of fertilizer every spring and make a profit out of 

 it in the growing of cotton." This man, fortunately, has a large body of very 

 fine land, well supplied with humus, and on which commercial fertilizers act 

 very finely; doubtless what he said was true and that he does make a profit 

 in cotton farming with heavy doses of fertilizer on his land. But it would 

 be easy to demonstrate that the profit would be much larger and the outlay 

 for fertilizers much less by farming instead of merely planting his land. 

 But there are thousands of farms in the South which have been so com- 

 pletely run down by bad culture that even the application of fertilizers 

 by a Station formula gives no profit. It is n common practice among 

 the larger cotton farmers to figure everything by the mule. The 

 area of land does not enter into the calculation, but only what they 

 can clear from each man and mule in the cotton field. At ten 

 cents per pound, a man and a mule can make, on land yielding half a 

 bale per acre, about $600 worth of cotton. This $600 must pay for the fer- 

 tilizer used on the land, and must feed the mule and the negro for a year, 

 while the same land probably could be, in a little while, brought to the pro- 

 duction of a bale per acre with less direct expenditure of fertilizers, is farmed 

 instead of being merely planted. In all of our Southern -cities the refrig- 

 erator cars from Chicago arc daily bringing beef for our consumption, in a 

 country where more and better forage can be grown than in the West; and 

 where men are planting thousands of acres in cotton with hardly a hoof on 

 the land except the mules which work the fields in summer and loaf all 

 winter. 



A proper rotation for a cotton farm involves the feeding of stock. The 

 feeding of stock requires forage and grain. The growing and harvesting 

 of forage and grain and the feeding of stock in winter, requires regular 

 labor from year's end to year's end, and gives steady employment and a better 

 class of laborers by reason of the steady work. It means cash coming in at 

 different seasons, which enables the farmer to buy for cash, and thus lightens 

 greatly the expense falling on the cotton crop. It makes the farmer a reader 

 and a student, and in this way has its influence on the home, for when people 

 get interested in books they soon improve in the home making. 



During the late depression in the price of cotton the writer was con- 

 tinually being appealed to by cotton farmers for information in regard to the 



