Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation. Mary Huston Gregory

from Alaska to the Panama Canal, with enough left over to reach from New York to San Francisco. If the money could be distributed, it would give us all, every man, woman and child in the United States, one hundred dollars apiece. The corn crop was worth $1,720,000,000; the cotton $850,000,000; wheat comes third with a value of $725,000,000; then come hay, oats, and other crops in vast amounts worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The cotton alone was worth more than the world's output of gold and silver combined. The corn would pay for the Panama Canal, for fifty battleships, and for the irrigation projects in the West, with a hundred million dollars left over.

      And this is all new wealth. If we build a house, we have gained the house, but the trees of which we build it are gone. The same thing is true of every article we manufacture. Something is taken from our store in the making. But after we have taken these wonderful crops from our farms the land is still there, and the soil is just as ready to produce a good crop the next year, and the next, and the next, if we treat it properly.

      This matter of soil conservation is of the greatest importance to every one of us. If you are to own a farm, or rent a farm, or till a garden, or plant an orchard ten years from now, it will make a great difference to you whether the man who owns it from now until then knows how to care for it so as to make it produce well, or whether, by neglect, he allows it to become poorer each year. It will make a far greater difference if twenty years elapse.

      It makes a difference to the farmer whether he gets twelve bushels of wheat to the acre, or whether he gets twenty, for the cost of producing the smaller amount is just as great as the cost of producing the larger, and the extra bushels are all profit. It makes a difference whether a garden furnishes all the fruit and vegetables needed by the family, or whether it does not even pay for cultivation, and the food must be bought at high prices. It makes even more difference to the dweller in the city, who must buy all that he eats, whether food is abundant or not. If food is abundant, prices are low, but when the yield is small the demand is so great that prices become high.

      Not only the men, but the women and children as well, are affected by these food values, because it is from the extra money left over after the actual cost of living is taken out that the clothing, the house-furnishings, books, pictures, music, travel and all the pleasures of life must come.

      Great as are our harvests, we are not raising much more than enough for our present needs. Each year we are using more of our food at home, and have less to export to other countries. In a few years more the public lands will all be taken, and there will be comparatively little more land than we now cultivate to supply a population that will be many times as great as at present.

      Men who watch the great movements of the world tell us that the time is coming before many years when there will not be food enough to supply all our people, when we shall be buying food from other countries instead of selling to them, when we shall have famine instead of plenty unless we realize the danger and at once set about to make the most of every acre of our land.

      James J. Hill, the great railroad builder of the Northwest, and one of the best informed men of the country on food production and the increase of population, is doing a great work in pointing out these dangers to the people on every possible occasion.

      Watching the great food-producing region of the country, he has noted that each year the yield per acre is growing less, and the population steadily more. He tells us that when our first census was taken only four per cent. of the people lived in cities, that fifty years ago one-third of the people lived in cities, and two-thirds in the country, that is, two-thirds of the people were furnishing food to the remainder. Now conditions are almost exactly reversed. Only one-third remain in the country, and must supply the food, not only for themselves, but for all the two-thirds who are not food producers, so that the food supply is lagging far behind the demand. The price of corn has advanced from twenty-five cents to sixty-five cents a bushel in ten years, and this in turn raises the price of live stock. And so all along the line. Prices are growing higher all the time because not enough food is being produced to supply the demand.

      So we can see that it is absolutely necessary that the soil be properly cared for if we are to continue to increase and prosper, for as Secretary Wilson has said, "Upon the fertility of the soil depends the whole business of agriculture."

      The soil is exhausted in two ways: (1) By erosion, or the carrying away of the entire soil itself. (2) By so using the soil that one or more of its principal elements are worn out. We shall consider this form of soil exhaustion first, because it more directly concerns the work of every farmer.

      By a fertile soil is meant one that has an abundance of plant food in the proper proportions. The soil contains all the elements that are needed to support life, but they are in an inorganic form, that is, they are lifeless. Plants alone can take these inorganic substances from the soil, and change them into starch, sugar, fats, and protein. All animals, including man, must get these substances through plants, or through other animals that have already absorbed them from plants.

      The soil contains ten elements that are absorbed or assimilated by plants. These are: (1) lime, (2) magnesia, (3) iron, (4) sulphur, all of which are found in most plants in very small proportions, and are present in most soils in quantities far beyond the needs of crops for ages to come; (5) carbon, which is obtained by plants through their leaves directly from the air and the sunshine; (6) hydrogen and (7) oxygen, which are taken from the water in the soil and carried to the leaves, where they also help to take the carbon from the atmosphere. With none of these elements, then, does the farmer need to concern himself in regions where the water supply is abundant, as they are, and will continue to be, plentifully supplied by nature. But the other three, (8) nitrogen, (9) potassium, and (10) phosphorus, are needed by plants in large quantities, and are taken from the soil far more rapidly than nature can replace them.

      All these elements are necessary to plant life, but some plants require a large amount of one element, others a small proportion of that, but a large amount of some of the others. No two varieties of plants require exactly the same proportions, so it is easy to see that the plant that takes out of the soil any one element makes the soil less capable each year of producing a good crop of the same kind.

      In the early days of farming in this country, it was the custom to grow a single crop, which had been found to give good results, year after year in the same field. In Virginia and other near-by states nearly all the best land was given every year to the cultivation of tobacco, which exhausts the soil rapidly. In the states farther north other crops were planted in the same way. As a result, some of the most fertile soil in Virginia, the Carolinas, Massachusetts, and other eastern states has been so exhausted that it is no longer worth cultivating. Everywhere throughout the New England states are to be found these worn-out farms, and, while they were never so fertile as the lands of the Mississippi Valley, each one was rich enough to support a family in comfort, with something left to sell; but because they were required to produce the same crops, and so take the same element from the soil, year after year, they have become so lacking in one of the essential elements that they are unfit for cultivation, and have been abandoned.

      It is wisdom and good business policy for farmers to study carefully this question of plant food and to learn what each crop is taking from the soil, so that it may be replaced. It has been found by long and careful experiments, that when land has been "single cropped," as this abuse of the land is called, for a long time, the soil has been almost entirely deprived of its nitrogen. As you know, nitrogen is one of the elements of the air, so that there is a never-ending supply, but most plants are unable to take it from the air, and until the last few years the task of replacing nitrogen in the soil was considered impossible. Recent discoveries, however, have shown that there are two ways in which it may be done. By means of electricity, nitrogen may be directly combined with the other elements of the soil. The other method is nature's own plan, and so is easier and cheaper. It has been found that while most plants exhaust the nitrogen from the soil, one class of plants, the legumes, of which beans, peas, clover, and alfalfa are the best known, have the power of drawing large stores of nitrogen from the air, and, by means of bacteria attached to their roots, restoring it to the ground.

      So farmers have learned that if they plant corn one year, it is wiser not to plant corn in the same field the next year, but