18 



in the right way. The plants will then grow better, stronger and will be 

 better able to resist insects and disease. 



When we feed our stock we know they grow faster on a balanced 

 ration. Our most dangerous criminals are our educated criminals. Why? 

 Because their education is not balanced. Many of them are lacking in 

 physical education, many more in mental education. When we take the 

 right kind of care of our boys and girls and give them a balanced educat- 

 tion physically, mentally and morally, they will grow up to be noble men 

 and women and then they will be able to straighten out the troubles in 

 this old world of ours in other ways than by wars and bloodshed. 



I thank you. 



PRESIDENT MANN: I think there is no one in the state who has 

 been doing work in permanent agriculture more consistently and has kept 

 more thorough data on what is done than Mr. J. C. Meis of Livingston 

 County, and he will talk to us now. [Applause.] 



PERMANENT AGRICULTURE. 



(J. C. Meis.) 



MR. CHAIRMAN, AND FARMER FRIENDS OF ILLINOIS: I am not going to 

 enter into the whys and wherefores of this soil treatment, because it is 

 conceded that it is the thing to do. As the topic calls for us to give our 



profit I thought it probably was the most 

 profitable thing for you if I would give the 

 profits that I have received from this work. 



I don't know whether there are any of you 

 men here who have the same trouble that I 

 have in my neighborhood. I am called a crank 

 on phosphate. Usually when a man departs 

 from a certain custom and gets out of the rut 

 he is called a crank. Beginning the use of 

 raw rock phosphate is really the hardest part 

 of the proposition, the ordering of that first 

 carload, therefore I am going to tell how I 

 got started. 



GETTING STARTED WITH PHOSPHATE. 



I moved on my present farm the spring of 

 1906, moving back to Livingston County from 

 Iowa where I had lived four years. During 

 the summer of 1906 I discovered from the 

 crops I raised and from the talk of my neigh- 

 bors that I did not have a very productive 

 farm. During the summer I had several talks 

 with a lumber dealer in Fairbury who was 

 born and grew to manhood on a farm in New 

 J. C. Meis York. He showed me several bulletins from 



the University of Illinois, showing the increase 

 in crops from the use of raw rock phosphate, 



and he also told what had happened to their land in New York where they 

 had grown good crops of grain and clovers and that their clovers began to 

 fail. They could not get a stand, and later their grain crops were not large 

 enough to be profitable. He had visited the old neighborhood after being 

 gone for many years and found the old home farm could be bought for $50 

 an acre, whereas it could have been sold for $200 an acre when he was a 

 young man. 



He finally ordered a small carload and intended to sell it at cost. He 

 had a hard time to dispose of it. He had expected to get his profit later 

 by doing a larger lumber business when he had gotten all the farmers 

 around Fairbury to use phosphate and thereby raising larger crops. I 

 bought two tons of this carload and applied it with an old end-gate grain 

 seeder on one side of an oats stubble field, during the fall of 1906. I had 



