The Story of the Soil | Page 9

talent or special interest; and then endeavor to go farther in that line than any one has gone before. When I first wrote to the State University I asked how long a time would likely be required for me to complete all the subjects that are taught there, and the registrar replied that, if I could carry heavy work every year, I might hope to take all the courses now offered in about seventy years. In considering this point of preparation for future work, it has seemed to me that if I leave the farm life and devote myself to law or to engineering, I must in large measure sacrifice about ten years of valuable experience in practical agriculture. I have learned enough about farming so that I can manage almost as well as the neighbors; and without this knowledge, gathered, as you say, in the school of experience, I can see that serious mistakes would often be made.
"You know that Doctor Miller bought the Bronson farm two years ago. Well, he has been giving some directions himself concerning its management. He has had no experience in farming, and last year, after he had the new barn built, he directed his men to put the sheaf oats in the barn so they would be safe from the weather. He did not understand that oats must stand in the shock for two or three weeks to become thoroughly "cured" before they can safely be even stacked out of doors; and the result was that his entire oat crop rotted in the barn.
"People who have lived always in the city sometimes express the most amusing opinions of farm conditions so well understood even by a ten-year-old country boy. I recently overheard two traveling men remarking about the differences which they could plainly observe between the corn crops in different fields as they rode past in the train.
"'Some fields have twice as good corn as other adjoining fields,' one remarked. 'How do you account for the difference,' asked the other. 'oh, I suppose the one farmer was too stingy of his seed,' was the reply.
"I am convinced that there are hundreds or perhaps thousands of valuable facts that have been acquired through experience and observation by the average farm boy of eighteen or twenty years that would be of little or no value to him in most other occupations; and in this respect I should be handicapped if I leave the farm life and begin wholly at the bottom in some other profession. Perhaps agriculture is not a profession, but I think it should be if the highest success is to be attained."
"I surely hope you will be successful, Percy, and your reasoning sounds all right; but other occupations seem to lead to greater wealth than farming."
"I very much doubt," replied Percy, "if there is any other occupation that is so uniformly successful as farming, in the truest sense. It provides constant employment, a good living, and a comfortable home for nearly all who engage in it; and as a rule they have made no such preparation as is required for most other lines of work.
"But there is still another side to the farm life, Mother dear, or to any life for that matter. Your own life has taught me that to work for the love of others is a motive which directs the noblest lives. If agricultural missionaries are needed in India, they are also needed in parts of our own country where farm lands that were once productive are now greatly depleted and in some cases even abandoned for farming; and. if the older lands of the corn belt are already showing a decrease in productive power, we need the missionary even here. If I can learn how to make land richer and richer and lead others to follow such a system, I should find much satisfaction in the effort."

CHAPTER V
WORN OUT FARMS

"WELL, you found some mighty poor land, I reckon," was the greeting Percy received from Grandma West as he returned from his walk over Westover and some neighboring farms.
"I found some land that produces very poor crops," he replied, "but I don't know yet whether I should say that the land is poor."
"Well, I know it's about as poor as poor can be; but it was not always poor, I can tell you. When I was a girl, if this farm did not produce five or six thousands bushels of wheat, we thought it a poor crop; but now, if we get five or six hundred bushels, we think we are doing pretty well. My husband's father paid sixty-eight dollars an acre for some of this land, and it was worth more than that a few years later and, mind you, in those days wheat was worth less and