FORTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONVENTION 81 



ful, but let me tell you that I was not satisfied and I made in- 

 quiries; we wanted to find out the facts in the case; and before 

 I left that community I found that for fourteen consecutive 

 years there had been fed on this little piece of land from 35 to 

 70 head of cattle. He had seeded his alfalfa three wrecks later 

 than the University did, and the University had put in the seed 

 when the soil was too dry, but the other man happened to hit 

 the right weather conditions. His apparent success will be the 

 result of many of the farmers in that vicinity failing. A man 

 can grow what he may be reasonably satisfied w^ith without 

 trouble and treatment of the soil, but if you do not put anything 

 back into your soil it may be like the man at Paris who a little 

 over a year ago, when I asked him about the treatment of his 

 soil from which he had taken crops since 1834 and had never 

 returned anything to it. He said he had four children. It seems 

 to me you are going to turn over a pretty poor piece of land t6 

 those boys, I said. "Oh, the devil with the bo3^s," replied he, 

 "I have always had to scratch for a living, and they'll have to 

 do the same." The man who cannot see beyond his own good,, 

 to the good of his children, is a pest in the community in which 

 he lives. The growing of alfalfa and maintaining of soil fer- 

 tility is a matter of wide range not only for a particular farm. 

 In the dairy business you can more easily maintain or increase 

 the soil fertility of your land, but remember this: That if you 

 grow upon your farm everything that goes into those animah^ 

 and then sell something from, the farm, you are taking some 

 soil fertility from your land. The only way that you can main- 

 tain the fertility, or increase it, with any system of farming, ex- 

 cept to buy the material and put it on your farm, is to get some 

 of the fertility from your neighbors, and that does not main- 

 tain the fertility of large areas. Suppose you are getting from 

 your neighbors feed for your dairy herd and you use all manure 

 and build up your farm, but while you are doing this sort of 

 thing you are reducing your neighbors' fertility, 'piling it on, 

 your farm, and after a while for fifteen miles around everybody 

 has moved away, and I want to know^ what your land is worth? 

 The thing for us to do is to lime our soil. Most of the Illinois 

 soil is acid. Then the bacteria upon the roots of legumes can do 

 their work. This cannot be done unless the soil is sweet. You 



