The Story of the Soil Part 12

"Only under unusual or abnormal conditions," Percy replied, "but the fact is that as a very general rule our crop yields are limited chiefly because the supply of available plant food is limited.

Sometimes the clover crop is a complete failure on untreated land, while it lives and produces a good crop if the soil is properly treated; and in such cases the difference developed in the field is just as marked as in the pot-cultures. In general we may set it down as an absolute fact that the productive power of normal land depends primarily upon the ability of the soil to feed the crop.

"I have here a photograph of a corn field on very abnormal soil.

They had the negative at the Experiment Station and I secured a print from it, in part because I became interested in a story connected with this experiment field, which our professor of soil fertility reported to us.

"This shows a field of corn growing on peaty swamp land, of which there are several hundred thousand acres in the swamp regions of Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. This peaty soil is extremely rich in humus and nitrogen, well supplied with phosphorus and other elements, except pota.s.sium; but in this element it is extremely deficient. This land was drained out at large expense, and produced two or three large crops because the fresh gra.s.s roots contained some readily available pota.s.sium; but after three or four years the corn crop became a complete failure, as you see from the untreated check plot on the right; while the land on the left, where pota.s.sium was applied, produced forty-five bushels per acre the year this photograph was taken, and with heavier treatment from sixty to seventy-five bushels are produced."

"Seventy-five bushels would be fifteen barrels of corn per acre.

How's that, Little Wife?" asked Tom.

"It's even more wonderful than the pot culture," replied Mrs.

Thornton; "but how much did the pota.s.sium cost, Mr. Johnston."

"About three dollars an acre," replied Percy; "but of course the land has almost no value if not treated; and as a matter of fact the three dollars is less than half the interest on the difference in value between this land and our ordinary corn belt land. These peaty swamp lands are to a large extent in scattered areas, and commonly, if a farmer owns some of this kind of land, he also owns some other good land, perhaps adjoining the swamp; but this is not always the case, and was not with the man in the story I mentioned. This man lived a few miles away and his farm was practically all of this peaty swamp land type. He heard of this experiment field and came with his family to see it.

"As he stood looking, first at the corn on the treated and untreated land, and then at his wife and large family of children, he broke down and cried like a child. Later he explained to the superintendent who was showing him the experiments, that he had put the best of his life into that kind of land. 'The land looked rich,'

said he,--'as rich as any land I ever saw. I bought it and drained it and built my home on a sandy knoll. The first crops were fairly good, and we hoped for better crops; but instead they grew worse and worse. We raised what we could on a small patch of sandy land, and kept trying to find out what we could grow on this black bogus land.

Sometimes I helped the neighbors and got a little money, but my wife and I and my older children have wasted twenty years on this land.

Poverty, poverty, always! How was I to know that this single substance which you call pota.s.sium was all we needed to make this land productive and valuable? Oh, if I had only known this twenty years ago, before my wife had worked like a slave,--before my children had grown almost to manhood and womanhood, in poverty and ignorance!'"

"Why wasn't the matter investigated sooner?" asked Miss Russell.

"Why didn't the government find out what the land needed long before?"

"I am a Yankee," said Percy. "Why have American statesmen ridden back and forth to the national capitol through a wilderness of depleted and abandoned farms in the eastern states for half a century or more before the first appropriation was made for the purpose of agricultural investigation? and why, even now, does not this rich federal government appropriate to the agricultural experiment station in every state a fund at least equal to the aggregate salaries of the congressmen from the same state, this fund to be used exclusively for the purpose of discovering and demonstrating profitable systems of permanent agriculture on every type of soil? Why do we as a nation expend five hundred million dollars annually for the development of the army and navy, and only fifteen millions for agriculture, the one industry whose ultimate prosperity must measure the destiny of the nation?

"Moralists sometimes tell us that the fall of the Babylonian Empire, the fall of the Egyptian Empire, of the Grecian Empire, and the Roman Empire, were all due to the development of pride and immorality among those peoples; whereas, we believe that civilization tends rather toward peace, security, and higher citizenship. Is not the chief explanation for the ultimate and successive fall of those great empires to be found in the exhausted or wasted agricultural resources of the country?

"The land that once flowed with milk and honey might then support a mighty empire, with independent resources sufficient for times of great emergencies, but now that land seems almost barren and supports a few wandering bands of marauding Arabs and villages of beggars.

"The power and world influence of a nation must pa.s.s away with the pa.s.sing of material resources; for poverty is helpless, and ignorance is the inevitable result of continued poverty. Only the prosperous can afford education or trained intelligence.

"Old land is poorer than new land. There are exceptions, but this is the rule. The fact is known and recognized by all America.

"What does it mean? It means that the practice of the past and present art of agriculture leads toward land ruin,--not only in China, where famine and starvation are common, notwithstanding that thousands and thousands of Chinese are employed constantly in saving every particle of fertilizing material, even gathering the human excrements from every house and by-place in village and country, as carefully as our farmers gather honey from their hives; not only in India where starvation's ghost is always present, where, as a rule, there are more hungry people than the total population of the United States; not only in Russia where famine is frequent; but, likewise in the United States of America, the present practice of the art of agriculture tends toward land ruin.

"Nations rise and fall; so does the productive power of vast areas of land. Better drainage, better seed, better implements, and more thorough tillage, all tend toward larger crops, but they also tend toward ultimate land ruin, for the removal of larger crops only hastens soil depletion.

"To bring about the adoption of systems of farming that will restore our depleted Eastern and Southern soils, and that will maintain or increase the productive power of our remaining fertile lands of the Great Central West, where we are now producing half of the total corn crop of the entire world, is not only the most important material problem of the United States; but to bring this about is worthy of, and will require, the best thought of the most influential men of America. Without a prosperous agriculture here there can be no permanent prosperity for our American inst.i.tutions.

While some small countries can support themselves by conducting trade, commerce, and manufacture, for other countries, American agriculture must not only be self-supporting, but, in large degree, agriculture must support our other great industries.

"Without agriculture, the coal and iron would remain in the earth, the forest would be left uncut, the railroads would be abandoned, the cities depopulated, and the wooded lands and water-ways would again be used only for hunting and fishing. Shall we not remember, for example, that the coal mine yields a single harvest--one crop--and is then forever abandoned; while the soil must yield a hundred--yes, a thousand crops, and even then it must be richer and more productive than at the beginning, if those who come after us are to continue to multiply and replenish the earth.

"Even the best possible system of soil improvement, we must admit, is not the absolute and final solution of this, the most stupendous problem of the United States. If war gives way to peace and pestilence to science, then the time will come when the soils of America shall reach the limit of the highest productive power possible to be permanently maintained, even by the general adoption of the most practical scientific methods; and before that limit is reached, if power, progress, and plenty are to continue in our beloved country, there must be developed and enforced the law of the survival of the fittest; otherwise there is no ultimate future for America different from that of China, India, and Russia, the only great agricultural countries comparable to the United States. An enlightened humanity must grant to all the right to live, but the reproduction and perpetuation of the unfit can never be an absolute and inalienable right.

"Under the present laws and customs, a man may spend half his life in the insane asylum or in the penitentiary, and still be the father of a dozen children with degenerate tendencies. There should be no reproduction from convicted criminals, insane persons, and other degenerates. Thieves, grafters, bribers and bribe-takers all belong in the same cla.s.s, and it should not be left possible for them to reproduce their kind. They are a burden upon the public which the public must bear, but the public is under no obligation to permit their multiplication. The children of such should never become the parents of others. It is a crime against both the child and the public.

"No doubt you will consider this extremely visionary, and so it is; but unless America can see a vision somewhat like this, a population that is doubling three or four times each century, and an area of depleted soils that is also increasing at a rapid rate will combine to bring our Ship of State into a current against which we may battle in vain; for there is not another New World to bring new wealth, new prosperity, and new life and light after another period of 'Dark Ages.'

"Whether we shall ever apply any such intelligence to the possible improvement of our own race as we have in the great improvement of our cattle and corn is, of course, an open question; but to some extent you will agree that the grafter and the insane, like the poet, are born and not made. Of course there are, and always will be, marked variations, mutants, or 'sports,' but, nevertheless, natural inheritance is the master key to the improvement of every form of life; and it is an encouraging fact that some of the states, as Indiana, for example, have already adopted laws looking toward the reduction of the reproduction of convicted degenerates."

CHAPTER XVI

PAST SELF REDEMPTION

"BUT I have rambled far from the subject a.s.signed me," Percy continued.

"That's only because I interrupt and ask so many side questions,"

replied Mr. Thornton, "but I hope yet to learn more about those 'suitable conditions' for nitrogen-fixation and nitrification. It begins to look as though the nitrogen cycle deviates a good deal from a true circle, and nature seems to need some help from us to make that element circulate as fast as we need it. I confess, too, that this method appeals to me much more than the twenty-cent-a-pound proposition of the fertilizer agent."

"Yes, indeed," added Miss Russell; "and if we had to spend three dollars an acre on this farm our 'Slough of Despond' would be worse than the slough, or swamp, Mr. Johnston has told us about."

"I fear the practical and profitable improvement of an acre of this land is more likely to cost thirty dollars than three," said Percy.

"Oh, for the land's sake!" came the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n.

"Yes, 'for the land's sake,'" repeated Percy; "and for the sake of those who must depend upon the land for their support for all time hereafter."

"How ridiculous! Thirty dollars an acre for the improvement of land that will not bring ten dollars to begin with!"

"It is better to look at the other end of the undertaking," said Percy. "Suppose you invest thirty dollars an acre and in a few years make your ten-dollar land produce as much as our two-hundred dollar land!"

"But, Mr. Johnston; do you realize how much money it would require to expend thirty dollars an acre on nine hundred acres?" continued Miss Russell, with stronger accentuation.

"Twenty-seven thousand dollars," was the simple reply.

"Well, Sir," she said, "you are welcome to this whole farm for ten thousand dollars."

"I am not wishing for it," he answered. "In fact I would not take this farm as a gift, if I were obliged to keep it and pay the taxes and had no other property or source of income."

"That's just the kind of talk I've been putting up to these girls,"

said Mr. Thornton. "By the time we live and pay about two hundred dollars a year taxes on all this land, I tell you, there is nothing left; and we'd been worse off than we are, except for the sale we made to the railroad company."

"Well, the Russells lived here very well for more than a hundred years," she retorted, "and my grandfather supported one n.i.g.g.e.r for every ten acres of the farm, but I would like to know any farmers about here who can put thirty dollars an acre, or even ten dollars an acre, back into their soil for improvement."

"The problem is indeed a serious one," said Percy. "Unquestionably much of the land in these older states is far past the point of possible self-redemption under the present ownership. Land from which the fertility has been removed by two hundred years of cropping, until it has ceased to return a living to those who till it, cannot have its fertility restored sufficiently to again make its cultivation profitable, except by making some considerable investment in order to replace those essential elements the supply of which has become so limited as to limit the crop yields to a point where their value is below the cost of production. Even on the remaining productive lands in the North Central States, if we are ever to adopt systems of permanent agriculture, it must be done while the landowners are still prosperous. If the people of the corn belt repeat the history of the Eastern States until their lands cease to return a profit above the total cost of production, then they, too, will have nothing left to invest in the improvement of their lands."

"But their fertility could still be restored by outside capital?"

suggested Mr. Thornton. "I know very well that is the only solution of our problem."

"Well, Tom, I would like to know where the outside capital is coming from," said Miss Russell.