conditions; they must maintain or improve the fertility of the land,
and they must be profitable. The failures in agriculture in the past
have resulted from the failure to recognize one or the other or a
combination of these two causes. Either the productiveness of the soil
has been exhausted by unintelligent system or the agriculture has been
unprofitable. In fact, the exhaustion of soil is rather to be regarded as
an economic term which means that the operations of agriculture are no
longer carried on at a profit rather than that the elements of fertility
have been entirely removed from a one-time fertile soil.
In considering live stock farming, then, it is only necessary to
determine first whether it is and has been successful in maintaining soil
fertility.
What is needed to maintain and improve the fertility of the soils?
The investigations on this matter are clear. There are four things
needed under existing conditions to supply directly or indirectly to
agricultural lands: vegetable matter or humus, phosphorus, nitrogen and
potash. Does live stock farming, as a system, provide these materials
in sufficient quantity to conserve the fertility of the soil? Without
going too much into detail, it is correct for us to say that in any
well planned system of stock farming, the humus supply can easily be
sustained; the nitrogen can be rapidly increased and the phosphorus and
potash supplied either through the application of fertilizers directly or
by the purchase of foods to be first fed to animals and the manure later
applied to the land.
In attempting to determine whether or not live stock farming is to
be considered as a system calculated to conserve soil fertility, one
cannot be greatly impressed with the unanimity of opinion in favor of
animal husbandry as a means of soil improvement. When soils have become
exhausted and unprofitable from continuous grain growing, the almost
universal advice is to change the system of farming to stock husbandry
and feed out all crops on the land. Nor is this advice to be regarded as
emanating from theorists whose conclusions have been drawn alone from
the test tube of the chemist, but more often such advice comes from men
who are trained in farm management, and have themselves demonstrated
that a rational system of animal husbandry will not only maintain but
improve the fertility of the average farm located in the corn belt. Live
stock farming carried on for the purpose of soil improvement is not an
untried experiment. Not only individual farms but whole communities have
been brought up from a condition of exhaustion and unprofitableness to a
condition of productiveness by animal husbandry.
Exclusive grain farming as practiced from New England westward to the
Dakotas has left behind a trail of depleted soils and where carried on
for too long a time ruined farms and abandoned homes have marked the way.
These same soils are today being reclaimed and profitably tilled as the
result of changing from grain farming to dairy and stock farming. This
change has taken place in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and is now occurring
in Minnesota. The result of profitable system of live stock farming
on even the poorest of soils is to be seen in Holland. On thin, sandy
lands reclaimed from the sea, dairy farming has increased the value of
the farming lands until now they are valued at $500 to $1,000 per acre.
Holland today supports a population twelve times as dense as Illinois,
and yet has an annual surplus of cheese and butter for export amounting
to more than four dollars per acre.
Fifty years ago Denmark was a wheat producing country. Its soils were
gradually being depleted of fertility and agricultural ruin was imminent.
The system of farming was at that time radically changed to a system
of live stock production, with the result that after forty years of
dairy farming the agriculture of Denmark is regarded as a model of
farm management, both from the standpoint of the conservation of soil
fertility and profits per acre.
Farmyard manure is now and always has been the greatest resource for
maintaining soil fertility on the typical Middle West farms. Dr. C. G.
Hopkins says that “Farm manure always has been, and without doubt always
will be, the principal material used in maintaining the fertility of the
soil.”
Director Thorne of Ohio has pointed out that the increased fertility
of English farms as measured in increasing wheat yields has, in his
opinion, been due to the fact that the cattle, sheep, hogs and horses
have increased rapidly per cultivated acre since 1865. In that year Great
Britain was maintaining the equivalent of one cattle beast for each acre
cultivated, while in 1900 the live stock population had increased until
there was maintained on British farms the equivalent of one cattle beast
for each cultivated acre.
When Great Britain maintained one cattle beast for each two acres of land
cultivated in grain, the average wheat yield was twenty-eight bushels per
acre. When she had increased her live stock population to the equivalent
of one cattle beast to one acre of land cultivated in grain, the yield of
wheat had risen to thirty-two bushels per acre.
The limits of this paper will not permit me to quote the opinions of all
the leading agricultural and soil experts who have publicly expressed
themselves on the important relations of animal husbandry to soil
fertility. But such national authorities as Henry Wallace, President
Waters, Dean Davenport, Dean Curtis, Governor Hoard and a host of
others have publicly placed themselves on record as favoring live stock
husbandry for conserving soil fertility on the American farm.
The production of farmyard manure in this country now represents a value
greater than the total value of the corn crop. The estimated annual value
of farm manure produced in America is two and one-third billion dollars.
All authorities agree that more than one-third of this material is
absolutely wasted by the farmers. Here is a source of fertility ten times
as great as all the commercial fertilizers annually sold in the whole
United States. If this manure now wasted could be intelligently applied
to the corn lands of America, there would be added $800,000,000 annually
to the agricultural wealth of this country.
In planning systems of live stock farming for permanent agriculture, it
is necessary to apply the amount of phosphorus removed in the annual
products sold, either as commercial fertilizer or by the purchase of
supplementary foods. This amount will be comparatively small, and if
added by the purchase of supplementary foods may be supplied at little
or no additional cost, as the profits from feeding will pay for the
phosphorus used.
No scheme of soil conservation can be successful unless it is profitable.
If live stock farming conserves fertility, but is unprofitable, then it
need not be further considered. But live stock farming is profitable, and
is more profitable than any other system of permanent agriculture which
has been devised.
The latest census figures show conclusively that the net income per acre
is greater from stock and dairy farms than from hay and grain farms.
The average annual net income from stock and dairy farms in the United
States for the ten-year period ending with the year 1899 was $11.42,
while the income from hay and grain farms was only $7.72 per acre.
Not only was the average income in the United States as a whole greater
from stock farms, but in some of the more strictly grain growing states
the same increased profit from stock farms is shown. In Illinois the
income from grain farms was $10.60 per acre; from stock farms, $12.55. In
Missouri, the income from grain farms was $7.69, and from stock farms,
$9.55. In Iowa the income from grain farms was $8.88, and the income
from stock farms, $13.17 per acre. In other words the profits from stock
farming in Illinois were 18 per cent, in Missouri 24 per cent, and in
Iowa 48 per cent greater than from grain farms.
In any ten-year period of the agricultural history of this country, the
net income per acre from live stock farms has been greater than from
grain crops.
I think all fair minded students of farm management problems in the
Middle West will agree that the most prosperous and best managed farms
throughout the corn belt today are the farms where live stock is a large,
if not the chief, factor of production.
The argument that live stock farming can be profitable only on cheap land
is fallacious. The highest priced farming lands in the world are utilized
for stock and dairy farms.
In all systems of exclusive grain farming which have been planned for
the maintenance of soil fertility, it is recommended that considerable
quantities of clover be plowed under and that all of the straw and
stover likewise be added directly to the soil for keeping up the humus
supply. While this practice unquestionably will accomplish the results
intended it is true that from an economic point of view such materials
are too valuable for the nutrition of animals to be thus employed. When
we remember that at a very conservative estimate, the stover or stalks,
leaves and stems of the corn plant contain not less than 25 per cent
of the total feeding value of the entire plant, and that under systems
of exclusive grain farming, all this material is so utilized that only
its humus value is secured, we must conclude that if there is another
method whereby this valuable feedstuff may be first converted into animal
products, such a method is certainly to be recommended in a convention
assembled to discuss the broad problem of conservation.
Plowing under green clover likewise is to be regarded as a practice of
doubtful economic value. At the Missouri Experiment Station, for a series
of two years, the average income from such clover pastured off with hogs
amounted to $34.11 per acre. This was estimating the pork product at only
six cents per pound. As a matter of fact during the years in which this
investigation was conducted, the pork was actually worth seven cents per
pound, and the actual income from the clover alone amounted to $40.00 per
acre.
I submit that when an acre of clover can be so utilized through animals
as to return to the farmer the equivalent of $40.00 in cash, that it
is doubtful economy to use this material solely for its humus value by
plowing under.
In accomplishing the above result, it was necessary to feed an average of
3,000 pounds of grain per acre with the clover. This grain at prevailing
market prices was charged to the hogs at sixty cents per bushel, the
market price, and the $40.00 per acre is therefore net income. The large
amount of grain fed to the hogs on the clover undoubtedly returned to the
soil as much phosphorus as was removed in the body of the animals, and
the ultimate result of this experiment was therefore not only to secure a
greater profit from the land by this method of utilization, but also to
provide generously for the plant food losses incurred by the storing up
of such materials in the bodies of the hogs.
On the average Middle West farm, there are now and will continue to be
great quantities of stover, hay, straw, grass and other materials which
are too valuable to be used solely for manurial purposes and are yet too
bulky to be profitably placed on the market. All such materials can be
profitably marketed through animals, and by so doing at least 50 per cent
of the humus value of the materials can be retained and a considerable
profit secured from feeding to animals.
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.