The progressive farmer and southern farm gazette. (Starkville, Miss.) 1910-1920, 1910-08-13
THE PARABLE OF THE HEDCEROW

pant roots dissolve these elements, as it WERE
Tor the purpose of making crops year after year.
Ihls reservoir or treasure house, we must re-
member, however, must not be drawn upon too
heavily. 1t will not do all the work It is rath-
er like interest on a certain amount of money
which interest the Farmer may collect but if he
begins to get reckless and draw more than the
interest, the capital suffers and bankruptcy is
inevitable.
So it is with the soil, this Farmer wisely rea-
soned We may draw upon it for certain
amount Of plant food to be used each year but
in the main, we must depend upon giving it back
the humus and vegetable matter that is taken
from it, We must grow peas and other forage
crops, feed them to stock, and return the manure
to the land. There will be some loss of fertility
or course, in selling even the lint cotton and the
grain corn, but the proportion of fertilizer re-
Guired for producing these is very small. In
fact, 1t is so small that if these alone sold off
the land, and good farming practiced, the plants
Will develop, or make available in the soil each
year, almost enough fertilizer to counterbalance
the loss to the land. and with very small applica-
lions of phosphate potash to keep up the bal
lance. the land will grow more fertile with every
succeeding season. OF course, wise rotation must
be practced. cover crops kept on the land in win
ter to keep the fertility from teaching, and we
must grow all the leguminous or nitrogen-gather
ing crops possible to take this most costly of
fertilizing elements directly from the air about
and store it up in the soil for future crops
At this point then we shall have advantage
even over the Hedgerow, for it drew upon the soil
alone, and yet kept itself increasingly rich, and
may draw upon both the soil and the air to
gather fertility for our cultivated fields.
Reasoning in this way. the Farmer has set him
self hopefully to the task of making his other
field as rich the Hedgerow, and we doubt not
hut hat ho will irctn IF oil of
he has begun to increase his keep of live stock.
He has discovered that there is a good market
for butter at very fancy price in his nearest
town-that by making good quality he get
10 cents more pound than is paid for ordinary
butter; and he has discovered also that there is
good market for beef He also has found out
that good breeds pay-that is, that the good
breeds lay flesh in these parts of the body
where meat sells for the highest prices and the
good breeds are. therefore, twice as profitable as
scrubs. He has also begun to make some money
from hogs not depending on corn alone, of
course, for feeding them, but he grows variety
of crops such The Progressive Farmer and
Gazette has recommended, which cuts the cost
of pork-making in half. He is going to make
two profits now: one from growing the crops and
another from feeding them-or perhaps, we
might say three profits, in that he will have the
third profit in putting the fertizing materials
back on the soil in the shape of barnyard manure.
Formerly he made only one profit, that of simply
growing the crop, and this very doubtful
profit in that the land itself was getting poorer
year after year. He was eating up his capital and
at the end. soil bankruptcy stared him in the
face.
vi.
But the Parable of the Hedgerow has
verified him. He is going to make his whole
field like the Hedgerow. He will put back on it
each year the fertilizng materials and vegetable
matter drawn from it, and he will also draw on
80 to
waiting to give our farmers for the mere asking.
Then his old field will grow corn black with