194 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



money at the current market rate, to plant that year after year, and 

 to move on to virgin fields as soon as the old farm rebelled by lowering 

 the quality and quantity of its return. It is still the practice, although 

 diversification of industry and the rotation of crops have been urged 

 for nearly a century and are today taught in every agricultural college 

 in this country. We frequently hear it said that the reduction in 

 yield is due to the wearing out of the soil, as if it was a garment to be 

 destroyed by the wearing. The fact is that soils either increase or 

 maintain their productivity indefinitely under proper cultivation. If 

 the earth, the great mother of human and animal life, is to " wear out," 

 what is to become of the race ? 



56. A DEFENSE OF THE PIONEER 1 

 BY F. A. WALKER 



The American people, finding themselves on a continent contain- 

 ing an almost limitless breadth of arable land of fair average fertility, 

 having little accumulated capital and many urgent occasions for 

 every unit of labor power they could exert, have elected and in 

 doing so they are, I make bold to say, fully justified on sound eco- 

 nomical principles to regard the land as practically of no value and 

 labor as of high value; have, in pursuance of this theory of the case, 

 systematically cropped their fields on the principle of obtaining the 

 largest crops with the least expenditure of labor, limiting their 

 improvements to what was required for the immediate purpose 

 specified, and caring little about returning to the soil any equivalent 

 for the properties taken from it by the crops of each successive year. 

 What has been returned has been only the manure generated inci- 

 dentally to the support of the live stock needed to work the farm. 

 In that which is for the time the great wheat and corn region of the 

 United States, the fields are, as a rule, cropped continuously, without 

 fertilization, year after year, decade after decade, until their fertility 

 sensibly declines. 



Decline under this regimen it must, sooner or later, later or sooner, 

 according to the crop and according to the degree of original strength 

 in the soil. Resort must then be had to new fields of virgin freshness, 

 which with us in the United States has always meant "the West." 

 When Professor Johnston wrote, the granary of the continent had 



1 Adapted from "American Agriculture," Tenth Census of the United States 

 (1880), Vol. Ill, "Agriculture," pp. xxx-xxxiii. 



