Europe, they have erected a statue to Captain Dalgas, who reforested
Denmark and changed a desert heath into a rich farming country. So now
Denmark is said to be, according to its size, one of the most prosperous
nations in the world. It was the patriotism and inspiration of Captain
Dalgas that enthused the citizens. He lectured to the people, and talked
to the children in the schools, and made converts everywhere. He gave
all he had, and begged and pleaded against doubt and opposition of the
most discouraging character, until success crowned his efforts. He will
be loved and his memory cherished by all the people of Denmark through
all future years as one who saved the nation. In many vital respects, for
energy and self-sacrifice, his work reminds us of our Gifford Pinchot.
We are, as a nation, too young to understand the dangers before us; for
we are just emerging from a condition of burning log heaps to make farms,
from a condition of too much timber for a small population to a condition
of too little timber for a large population. Yet we have enough if we
will now conserve and reforest. Our ancestors did the best they could
under conditions and the light that they had—what now seems waste, had
then no market and was unavoidable. As a nation we are proud of our past
and we should also be more proud of what we expect to become. As was
said not long ago by one of our greatest statesmen, “Conservation of our
resources does not mean that we shall become great in the present at the
expense of the future, but that we shall show ourselves truly great by
striving to make the Nation’s future as great as the present.” (Applause)
President WALLACE—The committee on nominations is ready to make its
report.
Mr. BAKER—Pursuant to an announcement made from the stage at the opening
of the afternoon session of the Congress this day, the members of the
nominating committee met in room 775, Baltimore Hotel, at 3:00 p. m., and
unanimously nominated the following officers for election for the ensuing
year:
President, J. B. White.
Secretary, Thomas R. Shipp.
Treasurer, D. Austin Latchaw.
Recording Secretary, James C. Gipe.
The report is signed by the following nominating committee: Mr. B. N.
Baker, Baltimore, Md.; Major E. G. Griggs, Tacoma, Wash.; Mr. A. B.
Farquhar, York, Pa.; Mr. H. C. Wallace, Des Moines, Ia.; Mr. Henry S.
Graves, Washington, D. C.; Mr. G. E. Condra, Lincoln, Nebr.
President WALLACE—You have heard the nominations. Is there a motion made
to accept and approve the report of the committee?
Delegate BAKER—I move that the report be accepted.
Motion was duly seconded and, on being put to vote, was carried.
President WALLACE—I want to thank members of the Congress for their
kindness to me. And I am going to make a confession now. I have been
running a bluff on you, for I never in my life presided over any
convention or association of more than thirty persons, and it is only by
the marvelous patience that this Congress has shown and its endurance
that I have been enabled to carry it through. I thank you, and I want to
say that I do not believe the mantle could have fallen on a better man
than Mr. J. B. White. (Applause)
President WHITE—I hope the election has been fair, if there has been an
election. Has there?
Mr. WALLACE—Yes, sir, there has been an election and you are president.
President WHITE—Has the committee reported?
Mr. WALLACE—It has, and reported in favor of you, Mr. Shipp, Mr. Latchaw
and Mr. Gipe.
President WHITE—This is a great honor, and I appreciate it very much,
more than I can tell. I have been in politics before tonight, but not
in this way. I will have to tell a short story. It will take less time
to tell it than it did for the events to transpire. I have got to tell
it straight because I see Governor Stone of Pennsylvania watching me. I
was a candidate one time when I thought it was necessary for someone to
represent some good principles. I published a newspaper. I owned a farm
and a small saw mill, and I was nominated because I was a granger and
because I had the reputation of being a laborer. I got the nomination
of the Democratic party of my state, and the nomination of the National
Greenback and Labor party of my county. Then the Prohibitionists met.
They were not quite sure about me as a Prohibitionist, but they said that
they would support me, and they would not put any ticket in the field
against me. So that I had the endorsement of the Prohibitionists, the
Greenbackers, the Labor party, and the Democratic party, but I did not
have the Republican party because there was another man running in that
party, and I had to have one opponent. The fight waxed warm. I drove all
over the county, to every school house; I met the people, kissed all
the babies in the county, and I was elected by a very large majority.
It was not quite unanimous, but it was very large. This appears to be
unanimous. And the next day after the election a gentleman came down from
the township, I think, of Limestone, up above Warren on the Allegheny
river. He came to see me, and said “I see you are elected.” “Yes,” I
said, “I understand I am. It is very gratifying as it has been a very
hard campaign.” “I came down to see Davis, the treasurer of this campaign
fund,” he said. “Davis is in Warren,” I told him. “Well, I stopped off
at Warren on the way down to see him and Davis was not to home. I spent
$30.00 in this campaign and Davis said to come right down after election
and get my money. I thought maybe you could pay it. You are elected, and
I come down to see you.” “Let us see, what did you spend that money for?
How did you spend it?” I asked. “Well,” he said, “I told Davis I could
carry Limestone Township. The way I done it was that I went and bought a
ten-gallon keg of whisky, and I got down by the ferry. The lumberman and
tie markers from up in that township had to go across the ferry. On the
other side I put the keg of whisky in the ferry house. Every man that
came along I says, ‘Come on, boys,’ and they came in to get their ferry
tickets. And I says, ‘Here, have a drink,’ and I gave them a drink, and
I gave them your ticket. I says, ‘Here is a ticket for White; go right
over on the other side and vote, and then when you come back come in and
get another drink.’ They went right, every one of them, and voted, and
they were so anxious to come back and get another drink that they never
stopped to talk with anybody. And that is the way we carried Limestone
Township solid for you.”
I said, “Well, that is very gratifying, but you know, of course, I am
somewhat of a candidate on the Prohibition ticket. I think you had
better see Davis about this.” “Well, yes,” he says, “that is all right,
I know; I knew you was a candidate also on the Democratic ticket, and
I thought you might pay this out of Democratic money.” (Applause) So
I think probably Davis fixed it without my knowledge. I will ask the
retiring president to introduce to this audience Prof. Hopkins.
Mr. WALLACE—Permit me to say that Prof. Hopkins has done a wonderful work
in the State of Illinois, and I have asked him to present the results
of that work, or to tell us about worn-out soils. If your soils out in
Kansas are not worn out, they will be unless you mend your ways. Now
you want to listen to Professor Cyril G. Hopkins of the University of
Illinois. (Applause)
Professor HOPKINS—As agriculture is the basis of all industry, so the
fertility of the soil is the basic support of every form of agriculture.
Without productive land there could be no American agriculture and no
American prosperity. The most important material problem of the United
States is to restore, to increase, and to permanently maintain the
fertility and productive power of our farm lands. In comparison with this
problem others fade almost to insignificance; and we do well to pause
in the rush and hurry of our business life, to measure the agricultural
record of the past and to consider the possibilities of the future.
I come before this National Congress of patriotic, progressive and
influential men and women, not to present theories or opinions, but
facts and data, which deserve and should command your immediate serious
consideration and your subsequent persistent and effective action.
Intelligent optimism is right and admirable, but blind bigotry paraded as
optimism is dangerous and condemnable. “Truth, crushed to earth, shall
rise again; the eternal years of God are hers”; and this Congress has
before it the duty and the right to uncover the facts, to face the truth,
and to plan intelligently for the solution of this mighty problem.
That vast areas of land once cultivated with profit in the original
thirteen states now lie agriculturally abandoned is common knowledge; and
that the farm lands of the great corn belt and wheat belt of the North
Central states are even now undergoing the most rapid soil depletion ever
witnessed is known to all who possess the facts.
WHAT CROP STATISTICS SHOW.
The crop statistics of the United States now cover two twenty-year
periods, and half a decade on the next. A comparison of these two periods
shows the average acre yield in the United States to have increased only
one bushel for wheat and one-half bushel for rye; while corn decreased
one and one-half bushels and potatoes decreased seven bushels per acre.
These crops constitute the basis of our human foods, even our supply of
meat being largely dependent upon the corn crop. Thus, in spite of the
vast areas of new land put under cultivation during the last twenty
years, and in spite of the improvements in dredge ditching and tile
drainage, in seed, and in implements and methods of cultivation, the
average acre yield shows little or no increase. In striking contrast
the census returns show an increase in the population of contiguous
continental United States from thirty-eight million to ninety-two million
people during the last forty years; and in spite of the fact that to feed
our rapidly increasing population we have extended our area of cultivated
crops beyond the humid and far into the semi-arid regions, and in spite
of reducing our corn exports from 213 million to thirty-eight million
bushels and our wheat exports from thirty-four to twelve million bushels
during the last decade, nevertheless the most common topic discussed in
recent years is the high cost of plain living in these United States.
These are American facts; and, while there need be no sensation, there
is need for sense in their consideration. A few people can live on
blind optimism or hot air, but something more substantial will be
required to feed the progeny of ninety-two millions, and added millions
of immigrants. It is said that the high civilization of the ancient
Mediterranean countries went down into the Dark Ages with laughter—Dark
Ages which covered the face of the earth for a thousand years and which
still exist for most of our own Aryan race in Russia and in India, where
more people are hungry day by day, and year by year, than the total
population of the United States.
The problem which now confronts America is nothing less than the
maintenance of prosperity for ourselves and of civilization for our
children; for civilization depends upon education, and only a prosperous
nation can afford the general education of its people. Poverty is at once
helpless, and soon ignorant and indolent. An impoverished people cannot
have adequate schools or schooling.
No greater problem ever confronted any nation than now confronts the
United States, but the solution is plain: In a word, we must increase
production and limit reproduction, especially the reproduction of the
unfit. To solve half of the problem is not sufficient; and, in passing,
I must emphasize the fact that, with the most practical scientific
systems of farming applied to all the farm lands of the United States,
there is still somewhere a limit to the highest possible production of
food and clothing materials in this country; but there is no limit to
the reproduction and increase of population except the starvation limit,
already reached in Russia, India and China; unless the public sentiment
of this Nation, in these times of education and general intelligence,
will support the inauguration and enforcement of legal laws based upon
the established natural laws of heredity.
Just and adequate legislation should be enacted by the Nation for the
better control of immigration, and by the states for preventing the
reproduction of every form of degeneracy, whether revealed by insanity,
criminality, idiocy, deformity, or beggary. Half of all the state revenue
is already required in many cases for the support of the non-productive
degenerate classes, upon whose reproduction there is still no check in
most states.
CROP YIELDS CAN BE DOUBLED.
That we can double the crop yields of the United States is not a
prediction, but a fact. To say that millions of acres of abandoned farm
lands in the older states can be restored and increased in productivity
far above the present average for the $200.00 corn belt lands is merely
to speak the truth. To accomplish these objects requires, first of
all, that agricultural ignorance shall be replaced with agricultural
intelligence in the minds of the people of influence in this nation.
Why should not every influential man and woman in America have a definite
and quantitative knowledge of the basic principles that to increase
and permanently maintain the productive power of our normal soils, in
practical systems of farming, requires the addition to the soil and
permanent maintenance of adequate supplies of only three important
constituents, limestone, phosphorus, and nitrogenous organic matter?
The limestone is contained in measureless deposits in almost every state.
All it requires is that it be quarried and pulverized and transported at
a reasonable cost.
The phosphorus is contained in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the
Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming
and Montana, in the greatest deposits known to the world. All that is
required to utilize these great stores of phosphorus for soil improvement
in good systems of general farming is to mine and finely pulverize
the natural rock and transport it to the farmer’s railroad station at
reasonable cost.
With abundant supplies of limestone and phosphorus thus provided, the
nitrogenous organic matter can then be produced upon the farm by the
growing of clover and other legume crops which have power to secure
nitrogen from the inexhaustible supply in the air; and by plowing under
this organic matter, either directly or in animal manures, the remaining
essential mineral plant foods, such as potassium, can then be liberated
and made available from the practically inexhaustible supply in the soil.
The man who is willing to study this subject will find that these facts
are as true as the fact that the earth is round.
Normal land contains thirty thousand pounds of potassium in the plowed
soil of an acre, and the air above contains seventy million pounds of
nitrogen; and yet the most common commercial fertilizer sold to the
general farmers in the older states contains both nitrogen and potassium,
with a small amount of phosphorus. The average farmer who buys fertilizer
at all merely accepts the teaching that reaches him, and as a rule this
teaching comes through the fertilizer agents, who are now selling to
the farmers of Indiana 900 different brands of fertilizers, and to the
farmers of Georgia more than 2,000 different brands.
The result is that the ton of fertilizer for which the farmer pays $25.00
contains less than a hundred pounds of phosphorus, whereas he ought to
receive and apply to his land a thousand pounds of phosphorus for the
same money.
Phosphorus is the one element we shall always need to buy—phosphorus, the
master key to permanent agriculture, permanent industry, and permanent
prosperity in America; phosphorus, in which we are exporting, practically
giving away, as a nation, a value which amounts to as much every year as
the total value of all the timber on all the Federal lands.
In 1848, Sir John Lawes and Sir Henry Gilbert began at Rothamsted,
England, an investigation to ascertain the effect of applying phosphorus
to normal soil where a good crop rotation and a practical system of
farming were followed. The Norfolk rotation, already well known at that
time as one of the best rotation systems, was turnips, barley, clover and
wheat. In these practical field experiments the turnips were fed on the
land and the animal fertilizer thus produced returned to the soil, which
was well supplied with limestone.
THE USE OF PHOSPHORUS.
During the next thirty-six years $29.52 worth of phosphorus was applied
to one part of the field; and in comparison with another part of the
field cropped and managed, the same, except that no phosphorus was
applied, the $29.52 worth of phosphorus produced $98.02 increase in the
value of turnips, $37.45 in barley, $48.93 in clover (and other legumes),
and $45.99 increase in the value of the wheat. The total value of the
crops grown on land not receiving phosphorus during the thirty-six years
was $432.43 per acre, while on the phosphated land the crop values
amounted to $662.82, an increase of $230.39 from an investment of $29.52
in phosphorus. These statements summarize the results of thirty-six years
of careful investigation in practical farming on normal soil; but not
one American in a hundred knows, utilizes, or imparts this information.
Meanwhile the ten-year average yield of wheat in the United States is
fourteen bushels per acre, while Germany’s average is twenty-eight
bushels and England’s thirty-two bushels per acre; meanwhile the United
States continues to export annually, for the paltry sum of five million
dollars, a million tons of our best phosphate rock, carrying away an
amount of phosphorus which, if applied to our own depleted and depleting
soils, would be worth not five million, but a thousand million dollars,
for the production of food for us for the oncoming generations of
Americans.
As an average of twenty-four years of carefully conducted field
investigations with a four-year rotation of corn, oats, wheat and clover
on normal soil at the Pennsylvania State College, the addition of $5.04
worth of phosphorus increased the value of the four crops from $32.55
to $44.72; and a comparison of the two twelve-year periods reveals
the fact that the average crop value per acre per annum decreased on
unfertilized land under this rotation from $11.05 to $8.18, a decrease of
26 per cent in the productive power of the land. Meanwhile the average
farmer, and even the average business man who owns a farm, allows the
land to be depleted and decreased in acre yield because of the erroneous
and widespread opinion that crop rotation will maintain the fertility
of the soil; whereas the truth, as revealed by every long continued and
trustworthy investigation, shows that the rotation of crops will no more
maintain the fertility of the soil than the rotation of the checkbook
among the members of the family would maintain the bank account.
The rotation of crops should, of course, be practiced, for it helps to
avoid injurious insects and fungous diseases, and stimulates the soil
to produce larger crops for a time, with the result, however, that the
depletion of the essential plant food elements is even more rapid than if
wheat were grown every year on the land.
In 1897 the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station began a field
investigation on normal soil with a three-year rotation of corn, wheat
and clover—and as an average of the next thirteen years, the application
of eight tons per acre of farm manure increased the value of the three
crops from $26.21 to $42.79, and the further addition of $1.20 worth of
fine-ground raw rock phosphate increased the crop values from $42.79 to
$53.28.
WRONG FERTILIZERS.
Meanwhile the farmers and landowners of Ohio continue, in the main, to
use high-priced so-called “complete” fertilizers in the same systems of
land ruin that led to the agricultural abandonment of much farm land in
the older states.
As an average of nineteen years, the Louisiana Agricultural Experiment
Station applied $14.45 worth of plant food, chiefly in organic manures
and acid phosphate, which produced an average increase of $62.25 in the
value of the crops in a three-year rotation of cotton, corn and cowpeas,
oats and cowpeas, grown on the typical much exhausted upland soil of the
South.
The average yield of cotton exceeded a bale to the acre for the nineteen
years. Meanwhile the average yield for the Southern states is one-third
of a bale per acre.
I have given you some of the cream of the world’s work in soil fertility
investigations on normal soils, which need for their improvement
phosphorus and organic manures, and sometimes limestone. Abnormal, or
markedly different soils, require markedly different treatment.
Thus four plots of normal corn belt prairie soil in McLean County, Ill.,
produced, in round numbers, only twenty-two, twenty-six, twenty-two, and
twenty-seven bushels of wheat per acre in 1911, although some of them had
received nitrogen and potassium; while four other similar adjoining or
intervening plots, which differed from these only by having been treated
with $2.50 worth of phosphorus, in 200 pounds of steamed bone meal per
acre per annum, during the past ten years, produced fifty-eight, sixty,
fifty-four, and sixty bushels, respectively, of wheat per acre.
But on the peaty swamp soil of Kankakee County, with the same amount of
phosphorus applied to several plots, the acre-yields of corn in 1903
were seven, four, five, and four bushels, respectively, on four separate
plots, while on four other plots, which differed from these only by
the addition of potassium, the yields were seventy-two, seventy-one,
seventy-three, and sixty-seven bushels of corn per acre the same season.
Again, on the sand land in Tazewell County, Ill., four plots, including
some treated with phosphorus and potassium, both singly and combined,
produced eighteen, ten, eight, and eighteen bushels of corn per acre
in 1906, while four other plots whose treatment differed from these
only by the addition of nitrogen, produced the same season sixty-three,
seventy-one, seventy-five, and sixty-six bushels per acre.
It is truly gratifying to acknowledge that the State of Illinois is now
devoting $100,000 per annum to soil and crop investigations and the
dissemination of the information secured, even though this is less than
one per cent of the revenue of the state, all of which come directly or
indirectly from the soil. It is also gratifying to acknowledge that,
according to the crop statistics reported by the Federal Government and
confirmed by the independent crop statistics of the Illinois State Board
of Agriculture, the last ten-year average yield of corn for the State
of Illinois is six bushels higher than during the twenty-five years
before the agricultural experiment station began to exert an influence
upon our agricultural practice, and also that a similar comparison shows
three bushels increase per acre in the Illinois wheat crop—increases
whose aggregate value for the state now exceeds twenty million dollars a
year; and yet I must confess to you that as an average the farm lands of
Illinois are yielding only half a crop; that by soil enrichment alone the
average crop yields of Illinois could be doubled even with the same seed
as we now plant, with the same amount and methods of cultivation and with
our normal climatic conditions.
On one of our old experiment fields on the University of Illinois farm
the latest three-year average yield of corn grown every year upon the
same land is twenty-seven bushels, while in a crop rotation of corn,
oats and clover the average corn yield for the same three years has been
forty-nine bushels, and where proper soil enrichment is practiced in the
same rotation the average yield of corn has been eighty-seven bushels per
acre—all grown from the same seed, on the same kind of land, plowed and
cultivated the same, warmed by the same sunshine and watered by the same
rains.