Part 33

The development of animal husbandry in modern farm practice is fundamentally important. Exclusive grain farming has never yet been satisfactory or permanently successful. History and present practice have clearly demonstrated the important relation of soil fertility to the keeping of animals. The productiveness of the acre of land is the most important factor in profitable agriculture. If it is true that the productiveness of the acre of land is maintained and often increased by the large use of domestic animals, this is a sufficient reason for large attention to live stock farming.

Animal husbandry is more profitable than grain farming. In any ten-year period of American agriculture, skillful live stock farming has been more profitable than exclusive grain farming. It is no argument to say that the average stock farmer would have secured larger temporary gains by selling his grain instead of feeding to animals. Statistics have shown a larger net income per acre from live stock farms throughout the United States than grain farms.

The highest type of farming is found in those localities where skillful stock farming is the rule. In Denmark, Holland, Great Britain, France, Canada and the United States, it is undoubtedly true that greater intelligence, skill and efficiency are required for the successful management of a live stock farm than a grain farm.

The yield of wheat in England has increased in direct proportion to the increase of the number of animals per cultivated acre.

The Middle West farmer will always produce large areas of grass, of corn stover, cheap hay and other products having little cash value. The profitable utilization of these materials involves the feeding and keeping of animals. The permanent prosperity of the Middle West farmers, and the conservation of our soil resources both require increased attention to successful methods of stock husbandry.

THE CONSERVATION OF THE FARM

BY EX-GOVERNOR W. D. HOARD, _Of Wisconsin_

In the limited remarks I shall have to make on this subject, I wish to preface by saying that it seems to me that one of the crying needs of conservation today is to conserve conservation. There is an immense waste of talk and time and crude unconstructive thought on this subject. Too many men are crying, “Lo! salvation lies in this direction, or that.” Too many are talking with an ulterior purpose of personal gain in notoriety or politics. Forests, mines and water powers claim the principal part of the thought and attention, when they are not the paramount subjects of conservation we consider. It is too easy to generalize or denounce or set up impractical standards of action by men who have not a constructive, practical thought to offer whereby the desired things we might wish for may be obtained. But here stands a great necessity, a glaring mistake, the result of gross ignorance on the part of the farmers of the American nation for many generations. They have wasted their heritage; they are continually wasting it.

Eighty-three millions of people are depending today for food on the wisdom, the skill, the conserving good sense of seven millions of farmers. By another decade a hundred million will face the same dependence. The cry goes up from this vast army of consumers against the high cost of living. The contingencies of the seasons, serious as they are oftentimes, are enough for producer and consumer to face. But we are confronted with the most serious danger of all in the wasting of fertility, the steady decline in the productive power of our arable lands. Here stands the question: An increasing demand and necessity for food and a steady decline in our lands of the power to produce food. How long shall that reproach to our intelligence continue?

Before that great and overwhelming necessity all other questions of conservation pale into insignificance. Study the situation as it exists today: From the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains the American farmer has blazed a pathway of destruction to fertility and forests. His is the hand that hath wrought this great destruction until today vast stretches of territory are hardly able to produce enough in an ordinary season to pay the cost of production.

The Commissioner of Agriculture of the State of New York asserts that that state alone has lost a hundred and sixty-eight millions of dollars in thirty years in the decline of farm values. In my native county of Madison in that state I can buy farms today for $20 to $30 an acre that once sold for $100 an acre. The same is true of the famous old Western Reserve in Ohio, of many sections in Indiana and proportionately so in the southern portion of Illinois. Who hath wrought this fearful destruction of the original productive power of the state and Nation? The farmer. Why? Because of his ignorance of the principles of fertility and of the methods that belong to intelligent agriculture.

Until very recently the forces of education, all under the control of the states, have done nothing to educate the farmer to a better understanding of his duty to himself, his calling as a farmer, and the millions who must depend upon him for food. The people have gone mad, so to speak, in the pursuit and worship of so-called higher education, and neglected the basic subsidiary schools where the main body of farmers must be trained, if trained at all, into an understanding of what they are about. You know, as every man knows, that the country district school is the only school where 90 per cent of all of the farmers of the land have received or will receive for many years to come the schooling they will get. The teachers of the state and the political forces of the state are solely responsible for the character of the country school. There has been but little vital pushing force among the teachers for the uplift of the country schools. The politicians have given it the go-by because as yet there are no votes in it as an issue. The farmers do not believe in it as a vital energizing principle in their midst for their own enlightenment and that of their children concerning the things that make for the betterment of agriculture.

Do you for a moment suppose that all of this appalling waste of fertility that exists and consequent destruction of farm values would have taken place if the country district school had been organized to teach the farm children the elements of fertility as science and common sense knew them to exist? We must then charge upon the past and present system of education the responsibility for this ignorance that has wasted the productive power of the Nation. And the processes of ignorance and indifference are going on today with but little, if any, check. Our schools of agriculture reach but a thousandth part of the farm children with their corrective knowledge. The agricultural press is doing what it can, but not more than 50 per cent of the farmers are readers and students of this vital question.

We flatter ourselves that we of the Middle West are to be saved from this tide of destruction because God has given us a soil of such marvelous fertility. But our farmers are just as great spendthrifts of this God-given heritage as were the Eastern farmers. The trouble lies in our lack of knowledge, real helpful knowledge. Think of the millions of acres of corn stalks in the great corn producing states of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa that will stand next winter unharvested, and in mute reproach of the lack of a little conserving intelligence sufficient to store them in silos where the contents might be fed to cattle and sheep and so produce an abundance of meat cheaply for the people. An average acre of that corn in an average season, if placed in a silo, will yield ten tons of the finest meat and milk producing fodder known on earth. Thirty pounds a day with ten pounds of alfalfa hay is sufficient to fatten a fifteen-month-old steer to the pink of condition in a year. Each acre, then, and an acre of alfalfa, would suffice to feed two steers for the year. What a tremendous feeding power at low cost is here disclosed, and yet it is annually wasted and not a country district school or school teacher is telling the farmer and his children any better. Think of the thousands upon thousands of poor cows that are kept by the farmers of the dairy states because they do not know better. Think of the wasted labor to raise the feed to support those cows, the wasted time and effort to milk and care for them, when, by exhaustive research it can be shown that not half of those cows are producing enough to pay for their keeping. You ask: Don’t the farmers know better than to keep such cows? Can you believe they would continue to breed and keep such cows if they did know better? Everywhere is seen the appalling waste of our farming—in fertility, in poor live stock, in lack of breeding knowledge, in lack of sanitary understanding, in a lack of intelligent methods of farm management. The discontent of the farmer is great. Let us be thankful for that, for we are told that “discontent is the vice of noble minds.” But, likewise, everywhere is he misled by contending politicians to believe that his salvation lies in politics, in the tariff up, or the tariff down, in fighting the corporations and the trusts, in order that certain leaders may have place and power. And all the time this mighty demon of waste is getting in his work. When will the farmer see that he must educate himself and his children back in the country district school to know good from evil, to understand the conservation of the soil and the great economic laws that underlie his very existence?

He cannot escape the demand of the millions who wait upon his hand for bread and meat. He is responsible to his own good citizenship not to waste the productive energies of the state. He owes it to himself and the hoped for profit of the labor of his hands that he make of this question of the conservation of the farm the foremost question of the age, as it truly is.

Dairy farming, if rightly understood and conducted, has the power to “knit up this raveled sleeve,” to re-endow all of these wasted farms with their original fertility and productiveness. For, understand, the true dairy farmer must be a wise manipulator of the soil, of plant life as well as animal life. No man in the domain of agriculture is confronted with a greater necessity of “knowing good from evil,” at every turn and in more ways, than is the dairy farmer. Ignorance is at work here to destroy fertility and profit as well as in all other branches of agriculture. But there are certain natural advantages that govern here more than in other lines of farming.

(1) The dairyman must so handle his farm as to support sufficient animal life to give him a living profit for his time and labor.

(2) That animal life is a constant contributor to the fertility of the soil through the abundant manure that is made.

(3) As a rule the dairy farmer is a buyer as well as grower of feed, particularly of nitrogenous feeds. This gives added fertilizing value to the manure.

(4) He builds silos and so consumes the coarser roughage of the farm, enabling him thereby to carry a much larger stock of cattle, hogs and sheep than he otherwise could.

(5) He is obliged to build barns and sheds, whereby the forage of the farm shall be stored with the least possible loss of its nutritive powers, and consequently this saves waste very greatly.

(6) He is compelled to become a large producer of legumes, like clover, alfalfa, vetch, etc., whereby by natural means, nitrogen is more largely restored to the soil.

All these are the natural and inevitable things that belong to his vocation if he is a man big enough to comprehend them. But there are some things he must do of an extra character if he handles his farm so as to constantly increase its fertility. He must be a liberal feeder of the land as well as his animals. He must comprehend that nothing can be grown on the farm without an expenditure of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash. The nitrogen, to a large extent, the legumes will evolve and deposit in the soil. But the phosphorus and the potash must be purchased. He must know something about these important elements, and he must accept it as one of his fixed expenses of the farm that these elements, as well as lime, must be yearly supplies.

Certain forms of dairying, like milk shipping, cheese making and condensing, are wasteful of fertility, unless the farmer guards against such loss, by artificially supplying the lime, and phosphate potash. It is largely through this taking of the whole milk from the farm without adequate making up of the loss, that so many farms in the eastern states became depleted of their fertility. Whenever butter dairying was carried on, and consequently the skim milk was used to grow calves and pigs, the live stock complement of the farm was kept up and the manure supply greatly enhanced. Such sections like Delaware county, New York, have suffered much less in the depletion of the soil in the past fifty years, than did Herkimer, St. Lawrence, Madison, Oneida and other of the cheese making counties of that state. The same a depleting process has been going on in New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and farther west. The wonderful growth of villages and cities calls for an enormous consumption of dairy products. This means taking the whole milk from the farm in a large degree and thereby greatly reduces the growing of live stock. We well remember sixty years ago how that central New York produced great crops of clover and a large supply of cattle, hogs and sheep. The tops of the hills were kept covered with the splendid forests that characterized that state. The springs and small streams were by that means maintained and we fished for trout in brooks that have not known a trout for the past thirty years, and which are dry most of the year. All this has been changed and sadly so for the worse. Had the farmers kept the tops of the hills covered with trees it would have conserved the water supply and helped maintain the side hill pastures.

Fifty years ago Horace Greeley, through his Tribune, warned the farmers of New York against the destructive effect of stripping the forests from the hill tops. Dairying in all its branches of butter production, milk shipping, cheese making and condensing, must, of course, be kept up for the necessities of the great army of consumers who demand it.

But the demand is just as imperative that the dairy farmer know what he is about and conduct his farm with an eye single to the preservation of its fertility. He must know more of the scientific side of his calling. He must be more willing to use some of his revenue in the purchase of fertilizers to produce against the natural waste that is constantly going on. He must adopt the principle that it is to his ultimate greater profit as well as the well-being of the state that he farm towards an increase rather than a decrease of the fertility of his land.

These are some of the paramount problems of the day and hour that confront the dairy farmer. The trouble is that here as well as elsewhere in this broad field of agriculture, ignorance has held sway. “We all, like sheep, have gone astray.” The wise live teachers of agriculture are becoming more obsessed every day with the thought that if the future millions of this country are fed, the American farmer must wake up, and that right soon, to the fearful mistakes he has been making through his ignorance and indifference in destroying the productive capacity of his land.

Every man, woman and child in the Nation is vitally interested in the promotion of conserving intelligence among the farmers of this country.

BACK TO THE FARM

BY HENRY IDE WILLEY.

This is the slogan of our clan; too long has the farm been deemed the dumping ground for those whom poverty or mediocre ability has kept out of the professions, arts and sciences.

“Anyone can farm” was the ancient idea. Not so the modern maxim. It is “back to the farm,” with education, intellect and experience that more than double the production of our soil and elevate the farmer to the same high plane occupied by others of equal ability and intellect in other callings.

Back to the farm is the maxim of our chief executive as he tours our country in the interest of progress.

It is not the aim of this article to enter into a scientific dissertation upon the chemical properties of all fertilizers, or to cover the entire ground with reference to the art of fertilization, it would prove too scopey a work to attempt any such a thing within the time and space that could be prudently allotted upon an occasion like this.

All that I shall attempt to do will be to touch upon some salient features of the art, and deal briefly with the most important details to be kept in view by the progressive farmer, who seeks to get the maximum results from a minimum area and amount of labor. Also I want to warn you of the danger of being victimized by unscrupulous dealers in fertilizers, and suggest some basic precautions to be observed, and finally to convince you that there is no dearth of fertilizing material in the United States that should be available at a reasonable price, to all who may require it. A just and beneficent Deity seems to have wisely provided abundantly all of the factors required to enable us to equalize the productions of our country, only demanding that we perform a certain amount of prefatory labor and wisely use the brains He has endowed us with.

Generally speaking we are required to do a dollar’s worth of work to obtain a dollar’s reward in all vocations. One dollar’s value in any of the precious metals requires a dollar’s worth of work or outlay; the same is true with a dollar’s worth of wheat, oats, beans, or anything else.

Where rains are not abundant and opportune, there are adjacent mountains with their precipitating possibilities and lakes, or reservoir sites in which to store water to irrigate about all of the lands capable of being profitably watered. Just so within our area are vast deposits of calcium, phosphates and other fertilizing factors, only requiring a certain amount of labor, to enable us to place them where they will do the most good.

Florida probably produces the greatest volume and best quality of calcium phosphates. Tennessee next. Then the Carolinas, Utah and Idaho, the former only needing railways to provide transportation facilities to provide abundant and cheap supply throughout the west.

In 1889, Albert Richter, Esq., discovered these last named deposits which are gigantic reserves for the future.

When tillage begins, other arts follow. Daniel Webster says: “The farmers therefore are the founders of human civilization.”

Farming is as much a business as any other vocation, and primarily, the farmer should be a good business man to be successful. In the main he follows his calling for the money he can make thereby, like other prudent men, seeking the largest possible return from his outlay.

It is not enough to raise a crop, a profit must be realized upon the labor and capital invested.

He must understand his business, must observe needed economics, yet must be ever ready to spend a dollar when he can see a fair interest to be derivable therefrom.

Farming is not only a business, but equally an art—the art of producing animal and plant life needful and useful to mankind.

A true knowledge of agriculture and kindred occupations necessitates a complete grasp of the principles upon which the art is based. In this enlightened age such knowledge is indispensable. When our country was new and only the most fertile soil was tilled, “anyone could be a farmer.” To sow and reap were all that was required, so lavish was Dame Nature in giving of the fertility stored up for centuries. But this soon sapped the vitality of the soil, its tillage ceased to be profitable, and in many instances abandonment of the farms ere long would follow.

This unfortunate result is greatly to be lamented, because, by intelligent precautions the calamity could have been averted. The farming of the future must be carried on by intelligent, educated men of liberal training.

Geology, botany, zoology, chemistry and physics have already done much toward the conservation of the fertility of the soil, but not generally, as should be the case.

Importance of water, as a source of plant food and a conveyor thereof, is one of the most important factors developed by chemical analysis. The enormous proportion of water entering into the composition of the plant and its incalculable value as a conveyor of plant food to the roots. Nearly 900 of 1,000 parts of the matured corn plant are water, exclusive of exhalations, which are considerable, or 1,000 pounds of corn during its growing period use about thirty tons of water. As this amount of corn can be raised on one-thirtieth of an acre, 900 tons, or an eighth inch depth layer, would be required for an acre, and about the same amount being lost by percolation and drainage gains as 1,800 tons of water per acre, thus proving the need for the conservation of the moisture of the soil. In fact 300 to 500 times more water in pounds is required, than dry matter.

First, as it composes 80 per cent of the mature crop, it is the most essential plant food. It also furnishes the hydrogen and oxygen found in dry matter equal to 10 per cent more, making 90 per cent in all derived directly from water.

Water also dissolves the plant food, facilitating its distribution. It stiffens, or prevents the wilting of plants to replace losses by evaporation, probably controls the temperature of the plants, and water is indispensable for the movement of food within the plant, constituting this the most vital single factor in determining the fertility of land, hence the great importance of irrigation where moisture is not abundant.

Within the time and space allotted, it would be impossible to deal with every factor relating to question of fertilization such as carbon, nitrogen, etc. I will therefore proceed to treat of the most potent and effective fertilizing compound. Phosphoric acid, tricalcite phosphate of lime or calcium phosphate. This is present in normal soil, in much smaller quantities than potash, and experience demonstrates, is more likely to become exhausted. In fact in some regions no other fertilizer is used.

The phosphates may be subdivided into two general classes, natural and the manufactured phosphates: The natural phosphates have two general sources—the bones of dead animals, and certain phosphates containing minerals which will be designated. Raw bone meal is made by the grinding of raw bones to a powder, and the finer it is, the more valuable the product. This contains about 22 per cent of phosphoric acid and 4 per cent of nitrogen. Raw bones contain a small quantity of fat also, and as this promotes rapid decay of the bone, the phosphoric acid and nitrogen are quite slowly disseminated to the crop.

Most of the bone meal of commerce is made from bones previously steamed to remove the fat, and a portion of the nitrogen compounds. Bone so treated contains about 28 per cent to 30 per cent of phosphoric acid and 1½ per cent of nitrogen. As these can be ground finer and decay more rapidly, they are more valuable and effective than the raw bones.

Tankage is an important source of phosphoric acid in so-called animal politogess. When the product contains a very large proportion of bone, it is sometimes designated as bone tankage, and may contain 7 to 18 per cent of phosphoric acid.

Bone black or animal charcoal is made by heating bone in air-tight vessels, until the volatile matter is drawn off, and is used in the refineries to purify sugar.