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Show WEARING OUT FARM QUICKLY Rich Soil Rendered Sterile Through Continuous Bad Crop-pins Crop-pins and Bad Management of Fertility. (By ARTHUR S. BILL.) "Our inexhaustibly rich soil" and many similar expressions to indicate that the land would never become less productive were quite common a decade dec-ade ago. But you seldom hear such words now; they are passing away with many other thoughtless conceits. But whoever heard of a man taking a piece of virgin soil and literally wearing it out in his own lifetime? A most impressive illustration of this very thing recently came under the writer's personal observation, a few miles from Carbondale, in southern south-ern Illinois. A man now well along in his nineties nine-ties is living upon a 120-acre farm which he secured from the government govern-ment about sixty years ago at $1.25 an acre. The place has never been transferred trans-ferred to another person. It was good ground and used to produce 35 bushels of wheat per acre, but has been farmed so constantly to corn and wheat without any intelligent intelli-gent rotation or provision to return the plant food taken off in the crops that now the produce of the land barely bare-ly enables the occupants to exist. The last wheat crop was two bushels bush-els per acre. Probably less than ten bushels of corn per acre were raised there this year. The land can be counted on for little if any more than a quarter of an average crop. Some of this land must lie idle every year to "rest up" for the next crop as the writer saw. A near-by farmer has 40 bushels of corn per acre and may have above 30 bushels per acre this year. Land is a good price in that locality. For any real farming that contem plates more than keeping soul and body together (his farm has been ruined. It will amount to nothing until it has the effect of right treatment, treat-ment, and rather expensive treatment, for a series of years. And many another an-other Illinois farm has been practically practical-ly ruined in the same time, though perhaps not many by the so-called farming of one person. The owner can never "build up" such land. The utmost he can do is to live. He has not even a dollar per acre to invest in improvement. Money for such wise investment must come from outside the farm. It takes a little longer to ruin the richer land of central Illinois, but it can be done just as certainly, as is shown by the 30 years of continuous corn growing on one of the university plots at Urbana. Now every intelligent farmer is beginning be-ginning to see that without some proper care and repair his soil will not maintain itself forever, any more than would his buildings. Nothing more significant to American Ameri-can agriculture has ever been uttered than the two sides of the same proposition prop-osition persistently taught by Dr. Cyril G. Hopkins, the University of Illinois soil expert, as follows: "To permanently maintain profit able systems of agriculture is our most important material problem, not only in Illinois- but in the United States. "If we shall succeed In Illinois in discovering and adopting into general agricultural practice systems of farming farm-ing that will restore our soils to their virgin fertility and permanently maintain main-tain a high productive capacity for these Illinois lands, it will be the first time for this to be accomplished anywhere any-where in the world over such an area." This is getting down to bedrock in agriculture. The most far-sighted and unselfish farmers are just beginning to comprehend the literal meaning of these facts and the advisability of acting act-ing upon them before it is too laie. |