Dr. Knapp, of the Department of Agriculture, said: “It has been found that the best seed bed added 100 per cent. to the average crop on similar lands, with an average preparation; planting the best seed made a gain of 50 per cent.; and shallow, frequent cultivation was equal to another 50 per cent., making a total gain of 200 per cent., or a crop three times the average. With better teams and implements, this crop is made at less cost per acre.” A bulletin of the Bureau of Plant Industry, at Washington, says: “It is possible within a few years to double the average production of corn per acre in the United States, and to accomplish it without any increase in work or expense.” It declares that twice twenty-six bushels, which is about what we now get, is a fair crop where these conditions are observed, three times twenty-six bushels a good crop and four times twenty-six bushels frequently produced. A similar increase in other farm growths is just as possible.
In a high sense this is conservation of the soil, because it shows the way to make one acre do the work of two or three or four. It is conservation of the soil in a still better sense, because the land, when so intelligently and considerately treated, instead of “wearing out,” not only maintains its productive power indefinitely but actually increases in fertility and value. These are facts which all history attests. They are facts which the most recent scientific research supports. The work before the promoters of the Conservation movement today is one not of discovery but of education. It is to assist in bringing home the truth to the minds and embodying it in the daily practice of the present farm population of the United States.
This tremendous task can be accomplished only by local demonstration and the force of practical example. Small model farms should be operated, preferably consisting of a few acres selected from ordinary neighborhood farms and treated intelligently, in every State, county and township. We have made a beginning of this work in the Northwest; and the results, though not yet completely enough ascertained for tabulation until the tale of threshing and marketing is ended, are as amazing as they are encouraging. Some of the States are providing for traveling instructors and supervisors in agriculture, following the policy successfully adopted in the most enlightened countries of Europe, thus raising the level of agricultural practice and educating the millions who are beyond the reach of the institutions where formal instruction is given to the young. It is imperative that we reach the older people, and the large percentage of the children of the farm who never get beyond the district school, if we are in earnest in the work we have undertaken.
To this practical side of soil Conservation this Congress should give its hearty approval. It should urge upon the people of every community the adoption of the demonstration tract and the local instructor, with as much earnestness as it has championed the saving of forests and the reclamation of arid lands. Ten per cent. of the money now expended in formal instruction in the institutions where agriculture is taught, or supposed to be taught, would put every farmer in touch with the man who could and should help him in the treatment of his land as readily and surely as the doctor helps his family when they are sick. It would be more than repaid every year in the value of the crop increase. It would be repaid over again in the healing of sick soils, the renovation of old lands, the preservation undiminished in every acre of our arable area of those elements of fertility without which plant life languishes, and the wilderness and the desert in a few generations sweep away the traces of man’s unworthy occupation. It is well worth the hearty and undivided support of public-spirited men. For without just such Conservation the time will come when our country will be unable to support its own people; the diminishing percentage of its population engaged in tilling the land will still further decline; and it will scarcely be worth while to consider how best human life may be prolonged and made sturdier and wholesomer physically by vital Conservation, because it will lack the sustenance that it can not longer draw in sufficient quantity and quality from nature’s withered breasts.
Paper, “War is the Policy of Waste”
WAR, THE POLICY OF WASTE—PEACE, THE POLICY OF CONSERVATION.
Mrs. Elmer Black, New York City.
In advancing some arguments bearing on that broad assertion permit me at the outset to express my satisfaction that the questions this Congress has set itself to consider have come to be recognized as among the most urgent of all the world’s humanitarian problems. For the peace movement and the Conservation movement are as closely interrelated as, in the pacifist view, the interests of the entire human race are mutual and not antagonistic. The advance of your program is the advance of ours; both are essential to the progress of mankind.
I do not suppose any one will cavil at my plea that when we talk of natural resources we must not merely include inanimate things—timber, minerals, lands, oil and waters—but the brain and sinews of the people as well.
An observant traveler in the United States, asked recently what he considered the greatest asset of the American nation, replied: “The American nation itself, with its self-reliance, ingenuity, the blended genius resulting from race fusion, and the boundless belief in its ability to reach any goal it sets out to attain.” With that contention in mind, I would at once emphasize the fact that neither the material resources of the world nor these higher resources of human equipment can be utilized or developed to their full complement till the profligate policy of international strife is purged from the activities of mankind.