The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette., May 28, 1910, Page 382, Image 2

About The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette. (Starkville, Miss.) 1910-1920

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The Land of Opportunity.
p'psHR SOUTH ia certainly advancing, and the
I low-priced lands will in the future be high
priced. Still it is not always wise for a man
to get a farm into fine condition and then sell it
because he can get more money than he paid for
It. A permanent family home is something worth
working for.
But there is sometimes danger to the farmer
when his land gets valuable. Many years ago,
just after the war, in one of the finest counties
in Maryland, the great inflation of values of all
sorts ran up the value of land there to fancy
prices, and farmers were mortgaging their homes
to buy other land at $100 an acre or more. Rid
ing one day with a keen business man, I remark
ed that the farmer seemed to be in luck. “Hard
ly,” said he; “take the instance of Mr. Blank. He
hub a nne larui auu is a goou larmer. vvnen ms
farm was worth $2 5 an acre he lived very eco
nomically. Now his land is worth over $100 an
acre, and his family think he is rich, and they
must put on all the extravagance of a rich fam
ily. But the farm is making no more than it did,
and he is really getting a smaller return on his
investment. He does not want to sell, and is real
ly poorer because of the extra cost of living.”
Those same lands since the settling down of
monetary affairs are selling for $50, or less, an
acre, and many people were ruined by buying land
at inflated prices.
But a steady and permanent increase in the
value of real estate that has been selling too low
will, of course, benefit the whole section if farm
ers do not get extravagant. Lands in the South
are certain to increase in value as the wave of
better farming spreads over the country of cotton
and corn. But the permanent increase in value
of real estate must come through the improved
productivity of the soil. When one man by good
farming brings his land up to making 100 bushels
of corn and over a bale of cotton per acre, that
farm will gain a selling price that will make the
owner’s neighbor, who makes 10 bushels of corn
per acre, look like 30 cents, as the saying is. His
land may increase in value slightly because of
what his neighbor has done, but the real way to
make a farm valuable, either for a permanent
home of the owner or for sale, is to increase its
productive capacity through good farming, busi
ness-like farming, profitable farming.
A Visit to Hampton Institute.
I WAS ALL LAST week at the Hampton Insti
tute for the negro race at Hampton, Va. The
teachers being all Northern men, they wanted
a Southern man to tell their students something
about cotton and tobacco culture. So I went and
made five lectures to the graduating class in agri
culture.
Hampton Institute seems to be doing the right
thing for the negro. They work them all day in
the field and shops, and they get all their school
ing at night, so that they earn their way through
by hard work.
• A few miles away they have another farm of
000 acres where thirty negroes do all the work,
and get some schooling there at night. On that
farm they have 125 cows, and the darkies do the
milking and haul the milk to the Soldiers’ Home
and the Fort. They pay these negroes $20 a
month and charge them for their board and tu
ition, which abouts takes up the $20.
But they are training some good farm hands,
for they are taught the best methods and use the
most improved machinery, and can not help being
immensely better hands than without the train
ing. In fact, it is a first-class training school for
skilled farm laborers. I was very much pleased
with the earnestness with which they worked.
Others are being trained in various trades in the
foundry, machine ships, blacksmith shops and
carpenter shops, and it seemed to me that they
have struck the best idea for turning out darkies
that will be better citizens.
I urged the graduating class to go back South
and work for wages and save their money till
they could buy land and not go into the hap
hazard croping with a lien on the crop. If they
will work on the Southern farms as well as I saw
them working at Hampton, these negroeB will be
worth far more than the usual class of hands we,
have to hire in the South, and should be encour
aged by fair wages to do their best. The negro
Is needed in the South, and he needs the training
he gets at Hampton to make him superior to the
Ignorant laborers we have to employ, who have
no such training, for at the Institute they are
kept under the strictest military discipline, and
if they do not toe the mark, they do not stay
there long.
And I believe it is well that they have Northern
men in control, for we Southerners would humor
them far more than the Northern men do, who
exact the best of work and the strictest discipline
just as an army officer would.
The late General Armstrong, the founder of the
school, understood the negro better than any
Northern man I ever met, and he started out with
the conviction that work under strict discipline
was what the negro needed to make him valuable.
He gave the discipline and training that they
formerly got on the old plantations, with a little
book learning added, putting into the negro some
of the Northern push and get-up, for never a
plantation overseer worked them more strictly or
jumped an idler more quickly.
And there are over 800 of them there learning
to work, and made to do their best. I never had
a more earnest class to lecture to, for they are
mainly Southern darkies and seemed anxious to
learn modern methods in cotton and tobacco cul
ture. Southern agriculture will be all the better
for the training they are getting at Hampton. As
a Southern man, I was very agreeably surprised
to learn of the methods in use at this school, and
believe that a great work is being done, for the
xegro is with us to stay, and the better his train
ing, the better for him and the South.
Love Your Work.
IT IS TRUE, as the Editor says in the issue
for April 2, that love for one’s work is the
important thing for success. Some people
seem surprised to see me wheeling manure Into
my garden, and doing all the garden work myself
instead of hiring a darky to do it.
One-half the pleasure in gardening or farming
is in the work one does himself. We have a far
greater pride in the crops that our own hands
have planted and tended, and I should lose most
of the pleasure in my garden if some one else was
doing the work for hire.
When I plant and tend a vegetable crop or a
flower bed with my own hands I know that, even
if it is not done right, it is done as I want it done,
and is not skimped by a darky while I rest in the
shadp. I.nvp for tho work mokirn thp n’nrlr n
pleasure, and eating the products of one’s own la
bor makes the food taste better, too.
The man who is ashamed to be seen at his work
has no business farming or gardening. I never
could see less of dignity in donning overalls and
working with plow or hoe than in wearing smart
clothes and bowing to the women behind a
counter.
DON’T CUT THE ROOTS OF THE CROP.—Mr.
Miller says that farmers should study the pro
cesses of plant growth in using fertilizers, and I
would also say in the cultivation of the crop.
When a man fully understands that the only part
of the roots of the corn or cotton plants that are
getting food from the soil is the little zone of
line root hairs near the extreme tips of the roots,
which at laying-by time are well across the rows,
he will never put a plow in there to tear them ofT
and deprive the plant of the food those root hairs
would have gotten for him, but will cultivate the
crop as level and shallow as possible to avoid In
in H n c the rnnlii t’uoru Vilcr f , i. __ . _
" » O - —' — - V VW» II KJI
cotton you cut off deprives the plant of millions
of feeding hairs out at the extremity of that root.
And yet, I have seen many a man coming out of a
corn row with his plow almost choked with the
roots he had torn ofT, and thinking he had done
good work in laying-by that corn with a big
ridge, when he had really shortened the crop.
Mr. French is right. We can beat the West If
we only farm right. He shows, too, the great
value of the natural pastures we have in lespedeza
and Bermuda grass. The census has shown that
for years North Carolina has made more hay per
acre than Iowa, and yet Iowa makes hundreds of
tons to North Carolina’s one ton, and sells it for
less than half the price hay commands in the
South. Our long teason and abundant rainfall
make the difference.
Big Corn Crops at Small Cost.
TO-DAY I HAD a letter from another farmer
who is trying to see how much corn he can
grow on an acre. He has an acre that made
33 bushels of wheat, and was sown to red clover
on the wheat, and last fall he plowed under the
clover with three horses deeply, applied 21 good
loads of good manure, and this spring applied 8ou
pounds of Thomas phosphate, 18 per cent grade,
7 5 pounds of dried blood and 75 pounds of sul
phate of potash and nine more loads of manure,
and has planted his corn in rows three feet eight
apart and eight inches in the rows, and wanted
to know if he could add more plant food to ad
vantage.
Now, what a piece of land he will have this
fall for alfalfa! It is high gray gravelly soil, and
with the stufling for the corn he is making a splen
did preparation for alfalfa, and 1 have advised
him to sow it after the corn is cut. Now that we
are learning what corn will do if gorged with
food in the soil and well cultivated, would it not
be better to go to work in a systematic way to
bring up all the acres on the farms to their best .
production in a business-like way 7
• m . f__ f P ft t ^ < I at A 1 > * t n 1 c* <k (i
it t* van e»v;v i **v w »v v
stuffed acre, is it not possible to get every acre on
the farm up to 100 bushels an acre through a good
rotation of crops and the growing and feeding of
the best forage? l.et us make corn, not regard
less of cost, but at the lowest posslblo cost per
bushel. Any farmer who can spare the money can
fill an acre with plant food, but it requires a
farmer and a student to bring up his acres to a
uniformly great production while making them
pay a profit in the doing of It. That is farming.
The getting of one big crop on an acre may not be.
Home Supplies.
MR. ADAMS comes up with the same old Idea
that everything else than the money crop
on the farm is simply •'supplies.*' While
a farmer should certainly have one special money
crop. It does not follow that, whether it Is
tobacco or cotton, should bo the only crop to bring
him money. Of course, he should grow supplies j
for the home, but If he farms right, ho will have
a great deal more to sell than tobacco or cotton.
In the best wheat-growing sections of Maryland,
for instance, wheat Is the great money crop, but
the farmers all sell corn and pigs, sheep and cat
tle, to some extent, and one never hears about
home supplies, for It Is taken for granted that the
farmers have these.
But our Southern tobacco and cotton farmers
seem to think they are doing well to grow sup
nliou for thn hmnn ilmnnml /tft 11- f.irininle vmu
supplies for the home, and some for other peo
ple, too. The sole dependence on one crop for nil
the cash of the farm will never lead to financial
Independence.
Ill II.I) A SI 1.0.—When one* can build a silo at
the figures given in the Dairy Special, why should
any farmer be without one? I have made In past
years many thousands of tons of ensilage, and l
would as soon think of farming and feeding cows
without a barn or stable as without a silo. In the
sand hills of Moore County, North Carolina, Mr
1 ufts has brought up the sand to making over HO
bushels of corn an acre, and 3 1 tons of ensilage
an acre with the manure made from feeding the
ensilage and peavlne hay, and this on land as poor
as exists on earth. He has gotten humus Into the
sand, and it is more retentive of moisture, and
grows crops where naturally a few yearn ago corn
would not grow knee-high. The silo makes corn
one or our greatest renovating crops.
I have written ho much in past years about
peas that I am glad to note that others are taking
up the pea. I Hatter myself that in the twenty
or thirty years I have ben preaching cowpeas to
the Southern farmer I have done something to
wards waking them up to the immense value of
tiie cow pea. Hundreds of acres are now grown
where one was grown twenty years ago. and yet
the price for the seed lias constantly advanced.
'Ibis is largely because they have taken to them in
Hie Not tli, and have found that cowpea meal is
an excellent protein cow feed. Do not fall to sow
them this year because the price is high, but get
into the selling ranks and have peas to sow of
>our own raising and some to sell to others who
prefer to buy.