MiscellaneouSt 



356 



[October, 1909. 



in the middle and northern part of the 

 state. Ordinarily these Southern Illinois 

 farms were nearly, if not fully, as pro- 

 ductive as any in the state. They have 

 been under the give-nothing-and-take- 

 everything system of cultivation, and 

 the result is that the land has been put 

 out of business because of mistreatment. 

 And so you will find it in every state 

 where the land has been worked on this 

 plan for any considerable number of 

 years. 



But we are not left to size up in a 

 general way the results of this suicidal 

 method of land cultivation ; the scientists 

 who are working in the field of agri- 

 culture have produced some very exact 

 information which tells the story in a 

 pointed and a precise way. A careful 

 reading of these authorities points to 

 the fact that the grain crops are reducing 

 the productiveness of the soil, under 

 present methods of cultivation, at the 

 rate of two per cent, a year. Few men 

 in America have gone into the subject 

 more deeply than Professor Hopkins, of 

 the University of Illinois, and he does 

 not hesitate to declare his conviction 

 that, if we keep on farming as we are 

 now doing it in Illinois, the State will be 

 an unproductive desert within a century. 

 He has not come to this conclusion by 

 guess work, but by a most careful system 

 of actual experiments. 



On one piece of ground under his 

 charge corn has been raised for twenty- 

 eight consecutive years— raised according 

 to methods common throughout the 

 state. The productiveness of that piece 

 has steadily declined, and it is certain 

 that, in a very few years, it will not 

 have enough power left to produce 

 either corn or clover. Our grain farmers 

 seem to feel that crop rotation consists 

 in alternating corn and oats on their, 

 land. How does this work out? Pro- 

 fessor Hopkins has put this to the test, 

 The land on which he has tried this 

 system was as good, originally, as any 

 in Illinois, and yet it produces only 

 thirty bushels of corn and thirty bushels 

 of oats to the acre. Now what does the 

 other side of this scientific work show ? 

 Practically alongside the strips of land 

 on which these experiments have been 

 conducted are strips not a whit better 

 or richer, naturally. They have been 

 handled on a different system of culti- 

 vation. The plots which have been 

 subjected to true crop rotation — clover, 

 corn and oats— and have been intelli- 

 gently fertilized have produced ninety 

 bushels to the acre. As showing what 

 real crop rotation will do without the use 

 of fertilizer I cite the fact that he gets 

 sixty bushels to the acre on land planted 

 to successive crops of clover, corn and 



oats. My own experience is that I can 

 raise seventy-five bushels of corn to the 

 acre on land subjected to right crop 

 rotation and right fertilization as against 

 thirty bushels per acre raised by my 

 immediate neighbours working by the 

 old methods on land naturally as good 

 as my own. This I have done right 

 along and on a large scale, too. What 

 is more, my land under proper treat- 

 ment is growing better year by year, 

 while theirs is steadily going down in 

 productiveness— and consequently in 

 price. If they stick to their methods 

 their land will, in a few years, reach a 

 grade of unproductiveness at which it 

 will not pay for cultivation. 



As nearly as I can arrive at it, about 

 seventy per cent, of the farm land in 

 Illinois, for example, has been cultivated 

 for thirty years under a "crop rotation " 

 consisting of alternating corn and wheat, 

 with almost nothing save the stubble 

 put back into the soil. This is one im- 

 portant reason why Eastern States — 

 Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut 

 and others— get a very much higher 

 average yield of corn tc the acre than 

 the great corn states of the Middle West. 

 In the Bast they practice crop rotation 

 and intelligent fertilization. 



Before leaving this question of how 

 our soil is depleted, let me empha- 

 size the fact that the United States 

 —the newest and greatest of all 

 agricultural countries— is admitted by 

 soil scientists to stand first in the list in 

 the rapidity of its soil exhaustion, and 

 that we are rapidly adding to our area 

 of abandoned agricultural lands. 



And it may be well to add to what I 

 have said of the experiments under 

 Professor Hopkins a suggestion of what 

 has been done in the same line of de- 

 monstration in England, where they 

 have had more time in which to try out 

 things. At the famous Rothamsted 

 Station they have grown wheat on the 

 same piece of ground for fifty years — 

 with the result that "the phosphorus 

 actually removed from one of the best 

 yielding plots in fifty years is equivalent 

 to forty per cent, of the total phosphorus 

 originally contained in the soil to a 

 depth of seven inches." 



ROTHAMSTED EXPERIMENTS IN CONTINUOUS 

 WHEAT EOF. FIETY-ONE YEAES. 



Average yield 

 Bushels per acre. 



No fertilizer 13'1 



Farm manure— 14 tons per acre... ... 35'7 



Commercial fertilizer : 

 Acid phosphate 392 lbs. per acre 

 Sulphate of potash 200 lbs. per acre... > 37"1 

 Sulphate of ammonia 600 lbs. per acre) 



