Mr. Terry began to speak:
"Thirty-six years ago last fall," he said, "my wife and I bought and moved onto the farm where we now reside. We went on there in debt $3,700, on which we had to pay seven per cent. interest. I had one horse, an old one, and it had the heaves, a one-horse harness, and a one-horse wagon, three tillage implements, and nine cows that were paid for; and a wife and two babies, but no money. Now that was the condition in which we started on this farm, thirty-six years ago, in debt heavily, and no money; but that is not the worst of it. If it had been as good soil as you have in some parts of this State, we should have been all right. How about the soil? For sixty years farmers had been running it down until it could scarcely produce anything. We had a tenant on the place one year, before we could arrange to move on, after we got it. They got eight bushels of wheat per acre, and he said to me, 'That is a pretty good yield, don't you think, for this old farm?' Oh, friends, I didn't think so;—never ought to have bought this farm;—didn't know any better,—born and brought up in town, my father a minister, and I thought a farm was a farm. But I learned some things after awhile. That tenant mowed over probably forty acres of land. (We originally bought one hundred and twenty-five.) He put the hay in the barn. It measured twelve tons. Half of that was weeds. Most of the hay he cut down in a swale. There wasn't anything worth considering on the upland. That was the condition of the land.
"How about the buildings? The house had been used about sixty years, an old story-and-a-half house. Dilapidated, oh, my! Every time the rain came, we had to take every pan upstairs and set it to catch the water. We did not have any money to put on more shingles. It was out of the question, we couldn't do it. How about the dooryard? It was a cow yard. They used it for a milking yard, for years and years. You can imagine how it looked. The barn was in such condition that cattle were just as well off outdoors as in. The roof leaked terribly. The tenants had burned up the doors and any boards they could take off easily. They were too lazy to take off any that came off hard. They burned all the fences in reach.
"Now friends, that was the farm we moved onto and the condition it was in. Some of you will know we saw some pretty hard times for a while. Time and again I was obliged to take my team, after we got two horses (the second I borrowed of a relative, it was the only way I could get one), and go to town to do some little job hauling to get some money to get something to eat. That is the way we started farming. I remember, after three or four years, meeting Dr. W. I. Chamberlain. Some of you know him. He said: 'Terry, if you should get a new hat, there wouldn't anybody know you. Your clothes wear like the children of Israel's.' They had to wear. No one knew how hard up we were. It was not best to let them know. That money was borrowed of a friend in Detroit, secured on a life insurance policy. We did not let anybody know how hard up we really were. My wife rode to town (to church when she went), in the same wagon we hauled out manure in, for a time. Time and again she had been to town when she said she could not do without something any longer and came back without it. Credit was good. We could have bought it. We didn't dare to.
"Now, friends, a dozen years from the time we started on that farm, under these circumstances, we were getting from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty bushels of merchantable potatoes per acre right along—not a single year, but on the average—varying, of course, somewhat with the season. We were getting from four to five tons of clover hay in a season, from two cuttings, of course, per acre. We were getting from thirty-three to thirty-eight bushels of wheat per acre, not one year, but for five years we averaged thirty-five bushels per acre, and right on that same farm. No fertility had been brought on to it, practically, from the outside. A man without any money, in debt for the land $3,700, was able to do this. Now, how did he do it? That is the question I have been asked to talk upon. I have told you briefly something like what we have accomplished. I might say, further, the old house I told you that we lived in for fourteen years while we were building up the fertility of this soil, we sold for $10, after we got through with it. It is now a horse barn on the farm of our next neighbor and has been covered over.
"Eleven years from the time we started we paid the last $500 of our debt, all dug out of that farm, not $25 from any other source. Thirteen years from the time we started, we carried off the first prize of $50 offered by the State Board of Agriculture of Ohio, for the best detailed report of the best and most profitably managed small farm in the state,—only thirteen years from the time we started on that rundown land, and no fertility brought from the outside; without any money; and meanwhile we had to live.
"Now I had arranged with the tenant the first year, before we went on there, to seed down a certain field. It had been under the plow for some time. I wanted it seeded so I could have some land to mow and he seeded half of it. It was only a little lot, about five acres. He seeded half with timothy and left the other half. That was his way of doing things, anyway. When we moved onto the farm later I naturally wanted to finish that seeding and get that field in some sort of shape for mowing. I went to my next neighbor, who lives there yet, and asked him what I had better use. I didn't know anything, practitically, about farming, and he advised me to try some clover seed. He said: 'So far as I know, none was ever sown on that farm. They have sowed timothy everlastingly, everybody, because it is cheap. I knew timothy wouldn't grow there to amount to anything If I were in your place I would try some clover.'
"I got the land prepared and sowed that clover alone, so as to give it a chance. I did have sense enough to mow off the weeds when they got six or eight or ten inches high perhaps, so that the clover could have a little better chance to grow. It happened to be a very wet season. I remember that distinctly. This was a lot near to the barn. I suppose what little manure they had hauled out had been mostly put on this land. With these favoring conditions the result was fairly good. Of course not half what we got later, but we got quite a little clover and when I came to mow it, and to mow that timothy at the other end, I could see I could draw the rake two or three times as far in the timothy as in the clover. There was more clover on an acre. A load of timothy would go in and a load of clover. When I fed it to the cows in winter I noticed when feeding clover for a number of days they gave more milk. I didn't know why. I don't know as anybody knew why then. There wasn't an experiment station in the land. We were following our own notions. But the cows gave more milk; I could see that plainly.
"A little later I had an experiment forced on me by accident. I tell you just how it came about. It resulted in putting a good many thousands in our pockets and I hope millions in the pockets of the farmers of America. Later I wanted to plant corn on this field, and, as I wanted to grow just as good corn as I could, I got out what manure we saved and put it on the land preparing for plowing. I knew there wouldn't be more than half enough to go over the field. I said to myself, if there was any good corn, I would like it next to the road where people would see it. Wouldn't any of you do it? I didn't have a dollar to hire any help. I paid one dollar that year for help, and it was awful hard to get that dollar. I began spreading that manure next to the road. The back half of the field was nearly out of sight. When I got half way back there wasn't any manure left and the back half didn't get any. Now it so happened that the timothy was on the front end of the field, and it got the manure. The clover on the back half didn't get any. It came about in the simple way I told you of. Naturally I didn't expect much corn where I hadn't put any manure, but what was my surprise to find it was just about as good on that clover end of the field without any dressing as on the timothy end with what I had been able to put on. It is only right I should say there wasn't much of the manure It was poor in quality because we couldn't get grain for the cows when we couldn't get enough for ourselves to eat. There wasn't much manure and it was pretty poor, but such as it was that was the result. More hay to the acre, better hay, increased fertility, some way, by growing this clover!
"Now let us go back a little. I think it was the second spring after we moved onto the place that I happened to be crossing the farm of my next neighbor, Mr. Holcombe, now dead. I found him plowing. He had been around a piece of land, I should judge five acres, half a dozen times. He was sitting on the plow, tired out,—too old to work anyway. He said, 'I wish you would take this land and put in some crop on the shares; I want to get rid of the work; I can't do it, and would like to let you have it in some way. All I want is that it should be left so I can seed it down in the fall again.'