The Mena weekly star., 1910-10-13
AR. FULTON AND HIS FARM
What an Editor Who Has Gone Back 10 the Farm" Proposes to Do to
 Eake Kis Land Better.

To the Editor of The Star.
 Dear Sir:-Every farmer in Polk county, no matter how small his farm may be, should raise his own meat and a surplus to sell, and in order to do this he must grow some corn every year. Cowpeas, peanuts and a lot of other products grown on the farm are all right as "fillers'' for hoes but there is but enc fnisher, and that is Old King Corn. In planning out my little 40-acre farm I find I have only about 4 or 5 acres of good corn ground, and think have figured out how can grow crop of corn on that land every year without wearing out the land or decreasing the yield of corn. On the contrary, believe can increase the fertility of the soil and also increase the yield of corn, and this is how l am going to try to do it:
 As stated in my last article I am going to plant my corn 1 feet apart each way, and at the end of the culti- vating period will SOW the field fairly thick with Whippoorwill peas. When the corn natures sufficiently will cut 1t up to save the fodder and each stalk will be cut off close to the ground. When the peas mature 1 will pick enough for seed the next year and then l will 50 in with a moving ma chine or an old keen scythe and get a crop of hay that will be worth from $l0 to SIP per ton. The next spring l will blow that land the usual depth for spring blowing, plant it in corn and then again iii cowpeas. My theory is that the stock peas will add more ni- trogen, phosphorus and potash to the soil than the corn will take away, and so think can solve the problem of having two good crops of feed on the same soil every year and still build up the soil. What do you know about that, you learned book farmers of the Athens of Arkansas?
 Speaking about nitrogen calls to mind the fact that there is at least $l0.000 worth of this valuable asset of nature floating around above my 40- acre farm and I want you to know, MT. Editor, that am going to capture about $4 ,o09 worth of that invisible factor in the fertilizing line and put it into the soil. The wild blackberry vine and the diabolical green brier vines that have been fighting for sew eral weeks have been helping me do this. In clearing up my place l have torn down several useless old fences, and changed others to more conven- tent locations, and in each fence row 1 found a thicket of thorny vines. 1 also found the richest land on the place along those old fence rows. What made them fertile? The despised blackberry and green brier vines. They are the farmers best friends, and yet their mission is so little under stood, their value so little appreciated that they are miserably condemned.
 What do we find coming up and cov- ering our old, wornout and abandoned fields? Blackberry and green brier vines. WhyY In the economy and wisdom of nature it seems that what is lost in one way is restored in another, and it is for man to improve upon this marvellous plan in order to get the best results from the soil he culti- yates. Thus we find that the cowpe not only does the work of the black berry vine much quicker but yields the farmer good profits on his land. What a field of study and investiga- tion this subject opens up to the in- telligent farmer. How many of them know what the little bulbs mean on the roots of their cowpea vines, and how many of us know how the myste- rious microbe gathers nitrogen from the air and stores it in the earth for our benefit T. P. Fulton,
 Cove, Ark, Oct. 5, 1910.