The value of rye, rape, buckwheat and other non-legumes
when used as green manures is very largely due to
the liberation of plant food by their decomposition
in contact with the natural phosphates, potash and
other minerals contained in the soil. The farmer
has no more important business than that of making
plant food available, especially by supplying liberal
amounts of decaying organic matter.
The following suggestions are offered to the land
owner:
To enrich the soil apply liberal amounts of limestone,
organic manures and phosphorus.
To enrich the seller apply small amounts of high-priced
“complete” commercial fertilizers.
Thus the average of seventy-three “Cooperative
Fertilizer Tests on Clay and Loam Soils,” extending
into thirty-eight different counties in Indiana (Bulletin
155), shows 13 cents as the farmer’s profit
from each dollar spent for “complete” fertilizers
used for corn, oats, wheat, timothy, and potatoes,
if valued in the field at 40 cents a bushel for corn,
30 cents for oats, 80 cents for wheat, 50 cents for
potatoes, and at $10 a ton for hay, over and above
the extra expense for harvesting and marketing the
increase, and of course the soil grows poorer, because
the crops harvested removed much more plant food than
the fertilizers supplied.
PERMANENT SOIL FERTILITY
Though intelligent soil improvement is the most
profitable business in which an honest man can engage,
ordinary farming is not a highly remunerative occupation,
and to a large extent the fortune of the farmer is
bound up with the increase or depreciation in the market
value of his land. There are at least three important
factors of influence which induce people to continue
farming:
First, the farmer is his own employer. He controls
his own job, is his own boss and has no superior officer
to lay him off because of disagreement, dull business
or political preferment. Farmers constitute by
far the largest class of citizens who own their own
business, and are thus “independent.”
Second, the farmer is able as a rule to make some
sort of a living for his family very largely out of
the produce of the farm, so that he gets some return
for his labor in terms of food, even when there is
no profit in farming as a business; whereas the wage-earner
of the city, as soon as his wages stop and his savings
and credit are exhausted, must see his family supported
by charity or starve. This is not fiction, but
fact.
Third, land is usually considered a safe investment,
in which one may hold a perfect and undivided title
to his property; and people will retain possession
of a farm even when it pays a low rate of interest,
rather than sell and invest the proceeds in some other
enterprise which they cannot control as individuals
or which may suddenly depreciate in earning power,
fail or be utterly destroyed.
