same cattle won the world's championship for two-year-olds.

LEARNING FROM EUROPE

In 1900 I made my first trip to Europe. I traveled slowly through France, Germany, Belgium, and the British Isles, studying cattle and farm practice by the way throughout the journey. I was astonished to find that the European farmers live a life of dignified independence and of comparative luxury and ease. And I was still more astonished to find and this is the most important fact, to my mind, that could be brought to the attention of the American people that American farm practice is fifty years behind European farm practice. Even Government agricultural experiment stations are beginning their work of "discovery" where the farmers of Europe left off fifty years ago. The most glaring waste of modern effort that I know of is the blundering struggle of American agriculturists to learn a half century's progress in farming by costly experience, when they could save themselves the trouble and the money by a little proper investigation of farm practice abroad. Think of our wornout soils and our uncertain crops, and compare them with Lord Rosebery's feat of growing 55 long tons (2,000 bushels) or more than 121,000 pounds of potatoes to the acre, on land that has been cultivated for a thousand years. And there are no crop failures on his land, either; nor crop failures on other English or German growers' lands. Or think of William Dennis & Sons, who began forty years ago on six acres and who have grown rich by growing potatoes on 3,000 acres of rented land, the valuation of which is $500 an acre.

of the expensive minerals known to farmers as "commercials" (nitrate of soda or other nitrogenous salts); and, best of all things, barnyard muck. Therefore, you will see William Dennis & Sons maintaining 600 head of cattle on a 3,000-acre farm, not primarily to produce beef or butter or milk, but to manufacture fertilizer so that they can grow the potatoes that have made them rich. They plant grass or vetch in the fields the day that a crop of early potatoes is lifted, so that another year of fertilizing may begin at once, and that the soil may be kept free of fungous and other injurious growths, and that it may be kept open and friable.

On my own Mt. Sopris farm I run 500 head of cattle, rotating my crops on a sixyear rotation: two years in potatoes, four years in alfalfa and clover. Thus, of 500 acres of tillable soil (the rest of the farm is pasture uplands) I have every year 100 acres in intensive potato cultivation. I have never sold a stalk of hay from my farm, and would think it a crime to do so; for every wisp of hay that leaves it would mean the robbing of the soil of that much fertility. The proper method is: feed your land muck to make it fertile enough to raise more hay to feed to cattle to manufacture more muck to feed to the soil to grow dollars in the form of potatoes to buy more cattle for which to grow more hay to make more muck to feed the soil again. Always, as you value your farm, remember the generous but always hungry soil.

RESULTS AT HOME

You may ask, what have I achieved by my theory? Last year, for example, I (and three neighbors who use the same methods and exchange experiences) had a

1. Care of the soil.

2. Selection of seed.

European farmers think of nothing so much as they do of feeding the soil. Only two methods of restoring fertility to the soil are known to man, and these methods they practice ceaselessly. One is to grow on it and plow into it the leguminous plants: clover, alfalfa, rye, vetch. The other is to feed it fertilizers: a combination

valley, on exactly the same kind of land and under the same conditions of climate, had a greatly lessened yield. I have twenty-six years' experience on the same lands, and the last twelve years I have applied these methods. During these twelve years I have had a steady increase in average yields. I have increased my yield of potatoes from 100 bushels to 400 bushels an acre; my yield of oats from 40 bushels to 100 bushels an acre; and wheat from 25.

bushels to 50 bushels. And I have eliminated crop failure from my experience. When the soil is in perfect physical condition you will always have large yields.

Another indispensable element in soil culture is tile drainage; so that air and water may be drawn freely downward through the soil from the surface of the earth. Strange as it may seem, drought is least disastrous where the soil most readily permits water to sink through it. Tiling at a cost of $40 an acre is a profitable permanent investment on land that is worth $100 an acre for intensive cultivation indeed, on any land.

Proper cultivation includes also a wise. use of the plow and harrow. Many a field is ruined by being plowed either when it contains an excess of moisture (which packs the soil into a compact, impenetrable mass), or when it is too dry (which breaks the soil up into large clods instead of opening it freely to penetration by roots). And many a farmer is tilling only half his soil by plowing only a shallow furrow, when a ten-inch furrow with a four-horse team would add a whole new farm to his resources just six inches below the farm that he has formerly utilized.

Seed selection: the American potato grower takes odd lots of potatoes - culls and unmarketable sorts of last year's crop - and cuts them into four or six pieces and plants those pieces, and then wonders why Nature does not miraculously increase them a hundred fold in beautiful and uniform hills. The German, English, and French grower, on the other hand, jealously maintains a special strain of seed potatoes of the finest medium sizes with the fewest and best-placed eyes and the smoothest skin and the firmest and bestflavored flesh, grown only for seed purposes in northern latitudes. He uses only whole potatoes for seed, because that method gives the struggling young plant a rich reservoir of nourishment on which to draw while its tender little roots are adapting themselves to the soil about them and establishing the sources from which to suck their sustenance from the earth. These whole seed are sprouted in boxes indoors, and cared for under almost hothouse conditions until the first warm days

make it safe to transfer them to the fields. Thus twenty to thirty days of precious growing time are saved and the crop placed that much sooner on the market. Northern grown seed are used because the potato is a native of cold climates and thrives best in northern latitudes or high altitudes. And the English method of planting the hills twelve inches apart or rows twenty-seven inches apart (instead of the usual American method of hills twelve inches apart and rows thirty-eight inches apart) gives two to three times as many hills to an acre as the American plan. These methods give the foreign growers a stand of plants 99 per cent. perfect, against probably about 65 per cent. in the United States; and they increase the yield by 75 to 100 bushels (two to three long tons) an acre.

For 1909, the average yields per acre of the greatest potato yielding countries were: United Kingdom, 221.1 bushels, Germany, 208.9, France, 160.3, Russia, 111.5 and the United States, 94.4 bushels. The acreage of the United States in that year was 3,525,000 acres, and the total yield, 376,537,000 bushels; and yet 8,383,966 bushels, valued at $3,677,034, were imported from more than nine foreign countries. If the better methods of Europe were employed in the United States, even estimating an average yield equal only to that of Russia, the least advanced of the civilized nations, our increased production would be 24,027,500 bushels more than enough to duplicate our exportations of that year and to leave two and one half times the amount imported.

These and like facts are the things that American farmers ought to know. European methods can be adapted to American conditions. I have made a reasonable fortune doing it, and have found happiness beyond the happiness of any other kind of life I have ever seen. To encourage the spread of this better farming is my ambition. And if others have my experience, they will find in the tilling of the soil a life of abounding healthfulness and unfailing interest, a field for energy and intelligence, full of satisfaction, of dignity, of independence, and of peace.