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Dore tuzie of S See

State of Alabama

ALABAMA PRINTING GO. MONTGOMERY

Reclaiming Southern Waste Farm Lands.

BY DR. EMILE O. KASERMAN, WINCHESTER, TENN.

Just as truly as the merchant’s stock of goods the farm is
to be regarded as the farmer’s capital, and this capital is
invested at its best only when every acre of the farm is bring-
ing the largest and most valuable crop that it is capable of
producing. Unproductive land is just as truly ‘‘dead stock”?
as unsaleable merchandise, and a casual glance at our bare
hills and vacant fields will show what a large area of our
Southland is ‘‘dead stock,’’ and sadly in need of renovation.

In the days when our plantations numbered their acres by
the thousands and lahur was, cheap, the planter could afford
to clear off the forest ‘growth and bring fresh fields into eul-
tivation whenever his yields of cotton, corn or tobacco fell
below a profitable figure, and he could “turn out’? his worn
fields. and let nature restore their fertility. But with the
breaking up of the large estates and the abrupt changes in
labor conditions this method of farming is no longer profit-
able, or even possible, for nature’s process of rejuvenating
the soil is much too slow for the planter with only a compar-
atively small acreage. He cannot afford to wait on Nature
to restore the fertility of his wasted fields, but must seek
some method of farming by which the fertility of his fields
may be maintained and their continued productiveness
assured.

This is the problem that faces the Southern farmer, and it
is a problem of vast proportions, and any real solution of it
must take into account not only purely agricultural questions,
but must deal also with educational and sociological condi-
tions. Iam glad to be able to say that much of the best
thought and most earnest endeavor of our day is directed
to the solution of this problem. This is an age of scientific
research and experiment, and we see on every hand the en-

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deavor to apply the best results of scientific research to daily
life. Science has now established its reign over the indus-
trial and commercial worlds, and its literature is rapidly
being translated into the language of the common people.
Our national and state departments of agriculture, our agri-
cultural colleges, our experiment stations, and various other
agencies have done much to foster an appreciation of the
breadth and interest of the science of agriculture when
studied for its own sake, for financial profit, for pleasure, or
for the benefit of mankind, and the usefulness of each of:
these agencies is becoming greater every day. But in the
end every ruzal home must be its own agricultural depart-
ment, every farmer must be his own professor of agriculture,
and the farm itself must be his experiment station.

He who undertakes the task of reclaiming and restoring

rasted lands must remember that the conditions he has to
meet will be to a very great extent local conditions. He must
take into account that no two States, no two counties, no two
fields, and not even any two acres will require exactly the
same treatment. There are differences of soil, differences of
climate, differences in the causes of waste and wear that must
be taken into account if he wishes to obtain the best results.
He must know from a study of the soil itself the kind and
condition of the soil he wishes to improve.

To the popular mind the renovation and improvement of
wornout lands carries with it the idea of the expenditure of
large sums of money, and the bringing about of large imme-
diate results. This may very well be true in isolated cases
where a man of means engages in the work for pleasure or
for the benefit of mankind. But most of us are engaged in
farming for a very different reason—it is our sole means of
gaining a living, and of course it rests with the individual
farmer whether it shall also be a pleasure. I believe that I
do not misrepresent the condition of the average farmer when
I say that his case would be well nigh hopeless if the renova-
tion of the impoverished farm meant the expenditure on it of
money gained from other sources. Any feasible scheme for
the renovation and improvement of his wasted lands must

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take into account the very important fact that the farm must
also furnish a living for the farmer and his family and his
stock, while it is being improved, and perhaps even enable
him to lay by something for the proverbial ‘‘rainy day.’’
The means for the improvement of the soil must come from
that soil itself, and the task is not nearly so hopeless as it
would seem to appear. While it is beset by many difficul-
ties, yet these very difficulties may be made to serve as step-
ping-stones to success by him who will deal honestly with his
fields, and who will apply the same rational methods that
every successful business man employs.

The Southern farmer has many advantages over his North-
ern and Western brother, but he has also difficulties and dis-
couragements that are peculiar to our part of the country,
far from the least of which is the lingering remnant of the old
cavalier idea that manual toil is beneath the dignity of the
gentleman. But I am glad to see that this idea is fast disap-
pearing. Not that the Southern gentleman is losing any of
his cavalierly qualities—far from it, for his gallantry, chiv-
alry and hospitality are, and ever will be, household words
as far as his name is known. And it is a noteworthy fact,
and one that is full of promise for our country, that we hear
less and less the complaint in our rural communities that our
young people look upon the farmer’s vocation as dull, labo-
rious and unprofitable. How many a youth has in the past
generation left the farm to spend his life in some industrial,
commercial, or scientific pursuit, only to discover later in life
that he has isolated himself from the very centre of nature’s
activities and has abandoned a world of opportunities for
scientific study in order to enter upon a life in many ways
narrower and more monotonous than the one he scorned in
his earlier years. Is not the rural fireside a better environ-
ment for scientific study than the narrow attic? Is not the
farm the greatest of all scientific laboratories, where the
investigator may read at first hand from the pages of the
book written by the great Master Scientist himself?

After the farmer has made the acquaintance of his soils
and has found the causes of their unproductiveness, then it

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is time for him to consider also the means at his command to
be employed for their improvement. As already stated above,
he will have to deal largely with local conditions, and no one
definite set of rules can be given that will meet each individ-
ual case. There is one rule, however, that with few excep-
tions may be safely said to apply to each individual ease.
The merchant who succeeds is the man who gives his per-
sonal care and attention, his best thoughts and energies—a
real vital part of himself to his business. We are not sur-
prised at the failure of a professional man who neglects the
interests of his clients and bestows his thoughts and energies
elsewhere; shall we then be surprised at the non-success of
the farmer who leaves his acres in the hands of hirelings to
take care of themselves as best they may? The result will
surely be disastrous. It may be laid down as a fixed ‘rule
that success on the farm means residence on the farm. Study
your fields until you know their disposition, their wants,
their behavior. Convince them that you have’ their best
interests at heart. Make friends of your acres, and they will
hear your voice, they will recognize your touch, and they will
respond to your call. Court your farm as you courted Mary
in the days when you laid siege to her heart and determined
that you would take nothing but ‘yes’? for your answer, and
the favors your farm will bestow on you will not be disap-
pointing.

Long-continued and heavy cropping is by no means the
only cause, and in fact not even generally the principal cause,
for the impoverished condition of large areas of our farming
lands. Many causes have been instrumental in bringing
about this ruin. Lack of any rational system of crop rota-
tion, or even the lack of any effort at rotation, but cotton or
corn from year to year, shallow and poor ploughing, exposure
of the unprotected cotton and corn fields to the leaching and
washing action of torrential winter rains—these are a few of
the principal causes that have wasted and are still wasting
our farm lands.

It is, of course, self-evident that in order to stop a waste
one must know where to look for it. For example, you might

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plaster the sides of a tank all over without stopping the waste
if it leaked at the bottom. Too much attention, then, cannot
be given to searching out and locating the causes of waste
and wear. Strange as it may sound, it is still a fact that the
average farmer actually wastes a far greater part of the plant
foods in the soil than he draws from it by his crops. His
practice is often just as wasteful as if he deliberately cut a
hole in his pocket that his nickels and dimes might slip
through.

The fertility of the soil depends very largely on the amount
of humas it contains. The term ‘‘humus’’ may be defined as
embracing all that ‘‘large class of compounds. derived from
the decay of former animal and plant life. This organic mat-
ter undergoes decomposition in the soil, and in the interme-
diate stages of decomposition and mixed with the soil it is
known as humus.’’? This humus performs a number of fune-
tions in the soil which are of the highest importance in crop
production, for it greatly influences the temperature, tilth,
permeability, absorptive power, weight and color of soils,
and directly or indirectly controls to a very high degree the
supply of water, nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash.

In view of this, it becomes clearly evident that the wearing
out of our soils consists simply and chiefly in the exhaustion
of its humus by the continuous planting of cultivated crops
such as cotton and corn. It is not the object of this paper to
urge that less cotton should be planted, or in any way to dis-
courage the raising of this staple product. Experience has
amply proven that the Southern states are by nature in every
way best fitted for its cultivation, and that nowhere in the
civilized world are conditions more favorable for its produe-
tion both in quantity and quality. Another thing is daily
becoming more apparent—the fact that the world is looking
more and more to the Southern states for its supply of cotton,
and will become more and more dependent on us for the ma-
terials wherewith to clothe itself. These facts are significant
in that they would seem to argue not a decrease in the acre-
age of cotton, but an increase in yield and quality. The vital
question, then, for the Southern farmer to ccnsider is methods

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and means by which his cotton fields which have been robbed
of their original store of humus may be replenished with this
most valuable and important element of fertility.

This naturally leads to the question of fertilization, and by
this I do not refer to the addition to the soil of chemicals, but
rather to the restoration of its humus. In this connection
there occurs to me a little couplet that may be familiar to
many present—

“Time and marl without manure
Makes both farm and farmer poor.’’

And one cannot help wondering of how many farms and farm-
ers in Alabama this might be true. Now there are at least
three well-known and successful methods of maintaining the
humus of the soil. These are: the liberal use of well-pre-
pared farm manures, green manurings, and a judicious rota-
tion of crops. The most successful farmer, however, does
not confine himself to any single one of these, but brings
about the best results by a judicious combining of all three.
It is a generally conceded fact that stable manure is among
the most lasting in effect of any of the fertilizers which can
be applied. This is due to the fact that in addition to its
direct fertilizing value, it is also valuable in making the inert
plant food in the soil more available by virtue of the power
which it possesses of uniting with the soil potash and _ phos-
phorie acid to form humates.

In order to show in a graphic way the necessity of main-
taining the humus in the soil to be planted in cotton, let me
give some figures representing the fertilizing constituents
used to produce a crop; and to avoid the confusion resulting
from the use of many figures, I will confine myself to nitrogen
alone. Nitrogen is at the same time the most valuable, the
most expensive, the most unstable and elusive, and yet the
most plentiful and most readily obtainable of all the fertiliz-
ing constituents. The production of every 300-pound bale of
cotton consumes about 46 pounds of nitrogen. About half of
this is returned to the soil in the leaves, stems, and roots of
plants left on the fields. An average market price for nitro-

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gen is about 13} cents per pound. This means that for every
bale of cotton you produce your field has lost in valne in
nitrogen alone about three dollars. Now take into consider-
tton the fact that for every pound of nitrogen actually util-
ized in the production of the crop at least three pounds have
been wasted, and if the fields are allowed to lie bare and ex-
posed to the action of heavy winter rains the waste is even
greater. The same thing is true, though in much less degree,
of phosphoric acid‘and potash. These figures seem alarming,
but every farmer has, in the unmerchantable residue of his
crops and in stable manure, such a valuable means of main-
taining the fertility of his soil, that if these materials are
carefully and systematically returned to the land it ought
never to be necessary to purchase potash and phosphorie acid
in quantities very greatly in excess of the amounts actually
sold as constituents of the products of his farm. The fertil-
izer value of food for ordinary farm animals ranges from say
about $1.00 to $15.00 per ton, and in the case of most of
‘them the fertilizer value is nearly or quite equal to the com-
mercial value. The manure, then, should be considered just
as much a part of the return from the feeding of farm ani-
mals as meat, milk, labor, or saleable animals. Indeed, the
manurial value of horses and cows may be safely stated at
from $25.00 to $30.00 per year per 1000 pounds of live weight.
No farmer would think of allowing the unnecessary loss of a
pound of meat, milk, wool or cotton, or of a day’s labor of
one of his draft animals, and yet many a farmer allows as
much as one-half of the value of his stable manure to go to
waste each year. ‘This loss is just as real and just as serious
as the loss of so many bills from his pocket-book.

If shallow ploughing has been the rule it is not generally
found advisable to plow deep at once, for the turning up of
much new soil at one time will generally be followed by one
or more poor crops. Let the plow go a little deeper each
year until you have reached a depth of from six to eight
inches, which will generally be found to bring about the best
results. With us it has been the rule and practice to pay
very great attention to the proper and thorough pulverizing

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of the soil after it has been ploughed. The object of plough-
ing may be briefly summarized as follows: To enable the soil
to absorb the rainfall more quickly than if would in its undis-
turbed condition; to maintain more of the rainfall near the
roots of plants; to admit fresh air to the roots of plants; and
to enable the roots of young and quickly growing plants to
penetrate the soil more readily. It will be at once apparent
that these objects are but half accomplished when the soil is
merely turned, and hence the need of subsequent cultivation
in order to prevent the loss of water by weeds and grass and
by evaporation.

When we recall that on an average seventy pounds of
nitrogen, thirty pounds of phosphoric acid and twenty pounds
of potash are sold with every ton of produce leaving the
farm, it will be readily seen that sooner or later some pro-
vision must be made for returning these plant foods to the
soil. Potash and phosphoric acid are comparatively cheap
and readily obtainable in commercial form as bone-meal and
superphosphates, but nitrogen is too expensive, and the
farmer cannot afford to purchase it in its ordinary commer-
cial forms except under rare conditions in highly specialized
farming. It is in this connection that I wish to speak briefly
of a judicious system of crop rotation. There is a class of
plants known as legumes which have been very aptly called
‘‘nitrogen traps,’’ for they possess the remarkable quality of
actually adding to the store of nitrogen in the soil instead of
drawing on it, and the cowpea is to the South what alfalfa is
to the West and red clover to the North—a forage plant per-
fectly adapted to the needs of the region where it grows.
Someone has very happily called a field of cowpeas the ‘‘poor
man’s bank,’’ but I wish to change the simile just a little,
for a crop of cowpeas is rather a check or draft on that bank
where nature stores her universal surplus of nitrogen, and
the Great Banker who watches over it all will never dishonor
your draft on that bank. Every farmer, be he rich or poor,
has more than three thousand tons of atmospheric nitrogen,
free and ready at hand, resting over every acre of his farm.
A certain quantity of this it is his privilege to draw into the

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soil and transform into immediately available plant food
every time he grows a crop of cowpeas.

We speak of bringing our lands back to their virgin condi-
tion; it is our privilege to improve them vastly beyond their
virgin condition. There are lands in some countries of Kurope
that have in many eases been under cultivation for hundreds
of years, and these same lands are now far more productive
than they were in their virgin state. There is no reason why
the same may not be true of our country. In fact, there are
in our midst some farmers who have applied to their fields
the rational system of farming suggested in these pages, and
right nobly have those fields responded, for where once only
three bushels of wheat grew per acre thirty-seven have since
been harvested. The Western farmer on his virgin soil is
Satisfied with twenty to twenty-five.

The solution of the problem of the renovation and rejuven-
ation of our worn-out and wasted farm lands would seem to
lie along the lines here suggested, and may be briefly sum-
marized as follows: Let the farmer eat, drink and sleep on
his farm, and cultivate a close personal acquaintance with
each individual field and acre of his lands. Let him pay
careful attention to thorough ploughing and good cultivation,
that the mechanical condition of his soil may be always at its
best. Up in our section we have a saying that it pays to
‘‘plow our corn before we plant it,’? and paradoxical as the
Statement may seem it is still literally true in showing the
great emphasis we'put on the matter of soil preparation before
the crop is planted. Then let the farmer adopt a rational
system of crop rotation. With every bushel of cotton seed
that you sell from your farm you sell about fifteen cents worth
of nitrogen alone, besides the immense waste that goes on
during the winter when your fields lie bare and exposed to
the leaching and washing action of the heavy winter rains.
Would not fairness to your fields seem to argue that at least
every third year you should plant cowpeas in order to restore
this nitrogen? And this argument gains yet greater force in
view of the fact that your crop of peas will be practically
fully as valuable from a money point of view as the cotton

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crop which you could have grown on the same soil, and it
will cost much less in labor. And the waste of this valuable
plant food element which goes on during the winter could
not only be counteracted and stopped, but fresh supplies of
nitrogen could be supplied to your soil while it is lying idle
in the winter by the employment of crimson clover as a catch-
crop for the protection of your fields from the winter rains;
and the turning under of the young green clover in the
spring when you prepare your fields for cotton would also
greatly improve the mechanical condition of your soil. I
have just urged the free planting of cowpeas, and a little
earlier in this paper I discussed the great value of stable
manure. The problem may have suggested itself to your
minds how best to utilize your crop of peas so as to derive
the greatest returns from it. Don’t you see the obvious solu-
tion? It is, in a single word,—cows. By feeding his peas on
the farm the farmer gets their full commercial value in butter,
milk, cheese, or beef, and at the same time he will retain on
his farm the full fertilizer value of the crop, which is almost
or entirely as great as the commercial value. Cotton, peas,
clover, in rotation with grain crops, with the methods of cul-
tivation and fertilization above suggested, will not exhaust
and wear out his lands, but will enable the Southern farmer
to make a good living, to lay by something against the day
when he can no longer work, and at the same time he will be
restoring his soil, not only to its virgin condition, but to its
ideal condition of fruitfulness.

This world is God’s world, and God’s world is one world,
and the laws which govern the field and the production of
its crop of weeds or fruit are just as much His laws as the
laws which obtain in the moral universe. Is, then, he who
knowingly or ignorantly transgresses the laws of the field any
the less a sinner than he who transgresses the moral law?
Let us, then, seek out and render grateful obedience to these
beneficent laws which God has written out for us with His
own hand in such beautiful characters and attractive colors
in the great book of Nature. As Leibnitz once exclaimed in

ital

joy over his studies, let us too “‘think the thoughts of God
after him.’’?’ A glorious future lies before our fair beloved
Southland, and God will help us do our part to hasten the
day when our milk shall lave a thirsting world, when our
meat shall feed its hungering thousands, and our silken fibre
clothe its naked millions.

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