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Show America's I Soil 77z ;7zw7 agricultural expert of this generation as been laboring for nany years to show farm people bow to raise crops scientifically ha v V-- ning meeting of agriculturists was to be held. Even the schoolchildren got their lesson from' this campaign; not only a lesson on alfalfa, hut on history and geographical subjects. It was a,' diversified program that the versatile speakers,, who' traveled with the alfalfa special, were able! to offer at each stop; but, underlying every talk,, whether' it was to the boys and girls, or- to the: men and women who had grown old on the faring there was the same lesson to be learned : "Fertilize "Ferti-lize the soil with brains." The result of this campaign was that over 200,-( 000 acres of land in the inland empire, never be-' fore in any kind of grass crops, were put into alfalfa the following year. Other farmers were quick to see the benefits received by those who; tried it first, until today there is hardly a farm. In this great agricultural section that does not contain at least a few acres of the wonder plant.. Thousands of farms which had been deserted be-! cause of the soil, worn out from constant plant- :.iit frt rrtr f'ron did noti 'men nau iftcn vjt.ov i lv. : i out from constant plant- ing to one crop, did not yield returns of any sort, were reclaimed, rejuvenated, rejuv-enated, mid the laud: given n value which ie did not possess even in, its earlier prime. Having accomplished' so much for the farmer !of the Northwest, Professor Profes-sor llolden turned his-eyes his-eyes to the South. The. state of Arkansas imme-. diately invited his attention. atten-tion. The need here was similar to that of the inland in-land empire crop diversification. diver-sification. The farmers of Arkansas had been growing cotton for nearly; forty years growing it to sell for money to buyj food for man and animal. ani-mal. The practice of thi v, T THE present time, when prices of all foodstuffs have reached the fiswl t h'sbest figures known in this coun-IKjpM coun-IKjpM try in a generation, it is interesting -ijSS'yi to consider the efforts of those who jJgJUi have labored long and unceasingly gSjBJjjL to so improve our agricultural re-HWftjr re-HWftjr sources that this very condition I - - a should be avoided. Among these un-selfish un-selfish w'orkers for the common good the figure of one man stands Jut conspicuously. This man is Professor Perry G. Holden, undoubtedly the most noted agricultural agricul-tural expert of our time. A few years ago Professor Holden trebled the value of the corn crop in Iowa. A little later he put millions of dollars into the pockets of the farmers of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. As a final achievement, he induced the farmers of Arkansas to adopt a system of crop diversification which resulted in an increase of the wealth of the state of more than $30,000,000 in a single year. And Professor Holden says he has only started ; that it is his ambition to do as much, or more, for every state in the Union, and the chances are he will accomplish his purpose, for he is today the leader in a movement for agricultural revival and rural uplift, which in its scope and significance, signifi-cance, is without parallel in this or any other country. What is of equal importance, he is at the head of an organization with practically unlimited un-limited facilities for carrying on the work. During Dur-ing the last three years he and his assistants have co-operated in organizing and conducting fifty-five campaigns for agricultural education, have spoken at nearly 10,000 meetings, and in order to meet these engagements have traveled approximately 1,000,000 miles by railroad and over 250,000 miles by automobile, while their activities have reached the enormous total of 6,000,000 people. Professor Holden has been described as the F.urbank of the soil the man wdio set King Corn upon its throne and crowned alfalfa queen. He has been called a missionary, a preacher, a philosopher, philoso-pher, a prophet and a teacher a professor in the university of the great outdoors. More than any other man he has set agricultural America to moving, and to moving in the right direction. It was while professor of agronomy at the University Uni-versity of Illinois, from 1897 to 1901, that Professor Pro-fessor Holden's work first attracted attention. Other men have allowed their energies and activities activi-ties to be bounded by the four walls of the schoolroom, school-room, but to Holden such a thing was impossible. He looked upon corn culture as a source of prosperity pros-perity and happiness to liumanity. He had a vision vi-sion of more generous fields, more golden harvests. He pictured big red barns, fine dairy cattle, happy hap-py homes. But he beheld these things as possible only through the united efforts and intelligent cooperation co-operation of the people and organized the Corn Growers' association. He recognized the agricultural agricul-tural possibilities of the sugar beet, and the Sugar Beet Growers' association came into being. Already he had done much for the farmers of Illinois, but he was not content. Men of achievement achieve-ment have little time for retrospection. He saw the need of improving the quality of the corn and organized both the Corn Growers' association and America's first corn-judging school, ne placed corn upon a higher education plane than Latin and Greek, organized the Illinois club for the dissemination of agricultural knowledge among young men, and revived and broadened the farmers' farm-ers' Institutes of the state. Then the Iowa State college beckoned him. As professor of agronomy and as director of the agricultural agri-cultural extension department of that institution he continued the work he began in Illinois. He did more. He "beat his own record," which is a motto he has held before him since he was a boy in a little country school house in the backwoods of Michigan. He inaugurated a better-corn campaign that is unique and majestic in the history of agriculture. He shattered all traditions of extension work by refusing to rely upon bulletins and other printed matter to carry his message to the people. He went in person to the farmers at their homes and taught them by word of mouth. He inoculated commerce and transportation with the bacteria of more and better corn and set a precedent for every state of the Union by conducting the first railway train ever run for the purpose of spreading spread-ing the gospel of profitable farming. "Add what would equal a three-ounce nubbin to a hill." he said, "and the gain will be ten bushels bush-els to the acre. About nine million acres are planted to corn in Iowa each year. That little nubbin more in each hill will mean an increase of ninety million bushels." In 1912, after Professor Holden had talked and demonstrated and labored for ten years, the nubbin nub-bin was added to the hill. The total increase in the yield that year was 98.914,557 bushels, which at 30 cents n bushel, the average price of corn that year, meant that the market value of this yield Increase was $35,609,240. All Iowa was proud of Holden, but Holden's fame spread far beyond the borders of the state. He became a prominent figure in national progress. There were those who refused to believe that Holden's activities should be confined to even one nation, so he was placed at the head of a mighty system had placed the state at the mercy ott w North and East, both in buying and selling. The-cotton The-cotton crop was sold in 1913 for $G3,000,000. lhl amount and $12,000,000 more were sent out or the state to buy foodstuffs which should have been, produced on the Arkansas farms. Professor Holden realized that it would be a tremendous undertaking to change a one-crop-system of forty years' standing to a safe system of agriculture whereby the farmers of an entlra state might be induced to raise their own feed and thus make cotton a cash crop. But the greater great-er the odds, the greater the incentive with him, and he entered upon the work with enthusiasm. With a staff of sixty men the campaign was carried on for a period of thirty-five days, approximately approxi-mately 1,500 meetings being held in forty-nine different counties, covering the entire cotton belt of the state. The speakers were not eloquent orators. They were men who had given their lives to the study of agricultural problems and knew their subjects from A to Z and back again. They pointed out to the farmer the folly of buying buy-ing food and paying a big profit to someone else when he could just as well raise that food at home and save this big profit. Likewise they told him that if the farmer up North could raise grain and beef and pork and sell them to the Southern farmer at a profit on lands valued at from $100 to $200 an acre, the Southern farmer could make an even greater profit by raising these commodities commod-ities for himself. According to the Little Rock chamber of commerce com-merce this campaign added $30,744,150 to the value of the agricultural products of Arkansas, a fact which is proved by government statistics. But there were other benefits of that campaign which are not so easily measured. This huge Increase does not take into account the money saved and kept in the state by the farmer who raised his own food at home money which in other years had gone out of the state, never to return. Nor does it take Into account the fact that by raising his own food, the farmer enjoyed a better living than ever before. Thus one by one the states of the Union are being be-ing covered by Professor Holden and his army of expert talent, the campaigns in each instance being be-ing pertinent to the direct needs of the people. They talk about soil improvement, crop increase, sanitation, better homes, better noads, "swat the fly," fruit -and vegetable canning, and a multitude of other subjects whatever, in fact, that will tend to the advancement of the health and home comfort com-fort for the farmer, Ids wife, his children, house servants and farm help. agricultural extension department, with headquarters headquar-ters in Chicago, organized for world-wide teaching of agriculture. After a period of great work in Illinois, and even greater work in Iowa, Professor Profes-sor Holden entered upon the world's vvorfc. But first there was more work to do at home, and Professor Holden was not long in deciding where to turn first. He had long known that the agricultural problem of the Northwest was the one-crop system. Great tracts of land had been seeded to wheat year after year until the soil was becoming worn out robbed of the elements necessary for the growth of plant life. He decided de-cided at once that the remedy was the growing of alfalfa, that wonderful plant which is not only a money-making crop in itself, but possesses the magic power of putting nitrogen and organic matter mat-ter into the soil. Thereupon Professor Holden organized the inland empire campaign, and, In cooperation co-operation with six great railroad systems of the Northwest, started the campaign for alfalfa on every farm. While the agricultural demonstration train inaugurated in-augurated by Professor Holden in Iowa was a mighty step forward, he believed there was a still better way of reaching the farmers. At last he hit upon it ; the automobile in conjunction with the railroad train. The farmer could come to the towns where the trains stopped, and thousands of them did, but in many instances this meant a long trip to and from the meeting places and perhaps a whole day's absence from work. The thing to do, then, was to go to the farmer, to meet him in the fields, on his own threshold. It was planned, therefore, that at every place where the alfalfa special stopped automobiles should meet it and whirl the speakers to prearranged meeting places: In schoolhouses, churches, town halls, theaters, barns, out in the open fields, by the roadside. When a meeting was held in an alfalfa field there was no question of its success, as many good lessons were easily driven home by illustrations illus-trations from the growing crops. In the fields, too, the lessons of inoculation, use of lime, eradication eradi-cation of weeds and time of cutting, could all be very plainly illustrated. To supplement this work the speakers used huge charts which told some interesting stories in a manner that was indisputable. indisput-able. The big comparative figures shown on the charts gave every farmer plenty of food for thought. The results of various tests showed that alfalfa, whether alone or In combination with other feeds, was far and away the best food for the production of pork, beef, dairy products and eggs. One of Professor Holden's strong points was that alfalfa will act as a land reclaimer. He declared de-clared that once It is given a chance it will refuse to be kept off of land that is now considered practically prac-tically valueless. Alfalfa is known to put back into the soil what other crops take out. By a peculiar pe-culiar process, the nodules that form on the roots of the plant extract nitrogen from the air and deposit de-posit it in the soil. And nitrogen is what other crops need. The regular schedule of the alfalfa special Included In-cluded from six to eight stops a day. thus allowing allow-ing for from 60 to 120 meetings, according to the number of speakers employed. After the dally stops It was headed for some town where an eve- |