The professional world. (Columbia, Mo.) 1901-192?, 1902-10-10

Last year in Colorado on irrigated
lane the producer got $50 per acre net
for his crop of sugar beets and $50 for
his potatoes, and the beets Slapped his
land, while the potatoes benefited it
for the following crop.
The possession of a good big pile of
dry wood for winter fuel enables one to
view the coal strike and consequent
shortage of hard coal from a purely
sympathetic standpoint. while the man
without the wood pile, with bleared eyes
and smutty nose, will gaze into the sui
phurous depths of a soft Coz. fire and
cuss the coal barons.
The effect of the working of the new
oleomargarine law is becoming more
visible each month. For the month of
August al 900 %50-pound tubs less of the
stuff were manufactured than for the
month of June. The manufacturers are
hunting every day for Sunday to find
out some method either mechanical or
chemical which will enable them to
evade the provisions of the law. The
scheme of educating the people to the
uncolored article is a failure.
In the pioneer days of the West we
have had cornfields visited by such
swarms of wild geese, ducks and sand
hill cranes that there would have been
nothing left had the birds not been
driven off. Why did we not shoot
them? There was no market for them,
and after one has had mallard duck,
Canada goose or prairie chicken as a
steady diet for three weeks there is
nothing tastes so good as a piece of salt
pork. Then in those days every shot
fired cost 5 cents, and money wherewith
to buy the powder and shot was very,
very scarce.
A friend had so acres of cats, a good
crop which will yield so bushels an acre.
He was a little behind the times. be-
u he went right to stacking this
grain just as soon as he was through
cutting, while nearly all his neighbors
left their oats in the shock, waiting for
a machine to thrash out the field. The
result is that our friend will be able to
furnish all his neighbors their seed oats
next spring at a good round price, while
they will have a lot of understandable
and spoiled grain, and they wish now
that they had been old fogies also.
A very costly lesson was learned by
hundreds of farmers through the grain
growing section of the West and North
west this season in the matter of de-
pending upon machines to thrash their
grain from the shock, all save the for
tunate few who were first on the thrash
ing circuit being heavy losers by rea-
son of ~unfavorable weather, which bad
ly bleached out the shocks of grain and
in many instances set them to growing.
There was fine weather enough i'm
mediately after harvest for nearly ev-
cry mar to have safely secured his grain
in the stack had it not been for the
shock thrashing craze which compelled
him TO go with all hands and help his
fortunate neighbor at the head of the
list do his thrashing. The losses sus-
tanned would pay the stacking and
thrashing bills for these men for sew
eral years.
A 20-acre field of corn growing near
where the writer lives was matured
early in September and will produce
at a conservative estimate rs bushels
per acre. This field was planted May
~ on a clover sod turned over last
September and has received clean and
thorough cultivation. There Is nothing
very remarkable about this, only that
right in the n~eighborhood where this
corn is grown there are a thousand
acres of corn which are so very much
inferior-the crop behind time, full of
weeds, half cared for and giving no
promise, If frost ONE at the usual
date, of making anything save 20 or 80
bushels OF soft corn to the acre. The
moral to this story Is that the one man
with the 20 acres knows something
about raising corn which his thirty
neighbors with the thousand acres
ought to know, for success is always
worth looking into. This 20-acre field
of corn might we'll form the topic for
a whole days discussion at a farmers
institute-soil, preparation, kind of
seed, cultivation and all that pertained
to the production of the crop. Such a
field is a practical object lesson, and the
owners experience is worth more than
an abstruse lecture by some scientist
on the growing of a corn crop.
We thought a few years ago that the
cultivation of the sugar beet might be
made a valuable feature of agriculture
in the corn belt of the country. We
have since changed our opinion. The
financial returns to the grower are al
together unsatisfactory. The crop needs
prompt care and attention when the
can least spare the time. The
needed help is hard to obtain, and the
labor connected with the crop is Of
the get-down -on-all-fours back break
ing type which the corn raiser despises.
The sugar beet will find friends in all
the sunny, irrigated portions of the
West and to some extent. in the more
thickly settled portions of the East,
where child help is cheap and easily
obtained, but not where 60 bushels of
corn to the acre can be grown or where
clover grows knee high and blue grass
thrives, where creameries prosper and
thA DA1nAI Thf-a h.. -- OI----