136 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION 



all indicated a soil of remarkable fertility. During the lusl cen- 

 tury these forests have been swept way, the merest fragment of 

 them remaining at the beginning of the twentieth centur\ . With 

 incredible toil the farn^ers of the last century felled the forests, 

 burned tlie brush, cleared away the fallen timber, and p^ lied the 

 stumps, removed tlie clones and converted these forests into 

 cultivated iields. Tliey li.i\c drained, broken up, improve] and 

 tilled the vast prairies, unbroken at the beginning of the last 

 century, which have oel uged the markets of the world wi'.h their 

 products. 



An energetic, industrious race were these nineteenth century 

 farmers; but the result of their labors has been improvement to 

 a greater or less degree cf the soils they tilled. They were lum- 

 bermen, ditchers, miners, /iither than farmers. They converted 

 the richness of the soil into grains and livestock, and have be- 

 come the feeders of tlie l:\:man family over the best porions cf 

 the globe; but a sa class they failed in the first requisite of good 

 fan»}ing, namely, to ynaintain unimpaired the virgin fertility of 

 the soil. 



These men, however, were not all poor farmers. Without 

 agricultural colleges and experiment stations except in the later 

 decades, without an efficient Agricultural Department until the 

 last decade, and with much agricultural literature, some of them 

 stumbled on methods of farming which met to a remarkeble de- 

 gree all the requirements of the scientific agriculture of the pre- 

 sent century. But these clearheaded, resolute farmers were in the 

 minority, as is evidenced by the fact that complaints of waning 

 soil fertility come from all the older timbered states east of the 

 Alleghanies and many west of them, from all the southern states, 

 and from portions of the prairie states where cultivation has 

 been general but little over fifty years. 



The cry for commercial fertilizers, heard first in the New 

 England states, now comes from Pennsylvania, Ohio, portions 

 of Indiana, Illinois, Missouri and Texas, and is being heard here 

 and there from Iowa and Kansas. This demand for commercial 

 fertilizers measures the extent of the recognized waste of soil fer- 



