84 ILLINOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. 



of about $8.45 worth of the fertility of your soil at the present 

 price of commercial fertilizer. That every time you sell a ton of 

 oats you are selling about $7.25 worth. Every time you sell a 

 ton of corn you are selling over $5 and the same amount on every 

 ton of hay. To me, this is a serious matter and one that affects 

 your interests greater than you at the present time have any idea. 

 What is your land worth here? (Answer by farmer, $150 an 

 acre.) Now are you getting interest on $150 acre land? If you 

 are not, then your land is not worth $150 an acre and the price 

 of it will have to come down so as to pay the owner interest on 

 its correct value. Farming is a business proposition just like 

 keeping a store or a bank. You must make a profit on the money 

 invested in order to retain its value. Now in order to do this, 

 you have got to produce more crops, better crops and something 

 that will go farther than you are producing at the present time. 



I have predicted for the last fifteen years and I think events 

 will bear me out, when I say, that you will never see the time in 

 this country when butter will again be a low price and I will make 

 a further prediction at this time, that you will never see a time 

 when you will see a low price for food and feed products, but this 

 is not a good thing for the farmers for the reason, that the tempt- 

 ation to sell these products will be so great that you will continue 

 this process of selling the fertility of your soil. 



We have got in the United States about 85,000,000 people 

 and in the last year, we only produced about 3,734,000,000 

 pounds of butter. The increase in our population for the last 

 three years has been about 7 per cent while the receipts of butter 

 at our four leading markets for the same length of time is 8 per 

 cent decrease. Now according to statistics compiled by the sec- 

 retary of commerce and labor, who was investigating the amount 

 of food products consumed by the laboring classes, found that the 

 average man where the price of butter was within the reach of an 

 ordinary salary, consumed about fifty pounds a year. Now take 

 our entire output of 3,734,000,000 pounds with our population of 

 over 85,000,000 and it only allows about twenty pounds to each 

 individual. You will see that we are not producing much more 



