The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-05-28

Not only the government but the states, counties and towns are interested in the movement and are giving to it large sums of money. The appropriation of Congress
 last year was S25000o, but to this $l13,000 was added from the Rockefeller fund, and many thousands were given by the bus mess organizations and the bankers. mer- chants and wealthy men of the various communities In addition to the large number of farms or experimental patches on farms under the direct charge of the government agents and their demonstra- tors, there are more than rocco farmers
 who are receiving instruction from the Agricultural Department by letter and are reporting the results. This makes a
 mighty correspondence school which is in-
 creased each week. The work is not con-
 fined to corn alone, but to the proper cul-
 tivation of cotton, oats, COW peas and hay.
 Big Money in Southern Lands
 1 I wish could give you some idea of the
 results that have already been accom-
 plished. I have spent the week at the
 Agricultural Department talking with the
 agents of the farmers cooperative dem | onstration work who have just come in
 from the fields and who are handling
 this enormous mass of correspondence.
 have also talked with MT. Knapp, who,
 with his father, the late Dr. S. A. Knapp,
 has special charge of this work
 They tell stories of hundreds of farmers
 who within the past three or four years.
 through proper farming, have climbed
 over the hill of difficulty into easy street, and of large number who are making big sums of money. One man. for in-
 stance, a MT T. O. Sandy, bought a tract
 of land about three years ago south Of
 Richmond, in Nottoway county, Va. He
 paid s4 an acre for it and began to raise | hay after the rules laid down by the de- | partment At the end of two years he was getting five tons of hay per acre from that s4 land and was selling the hay at $25 a ton In other words. his gross income for land that cost him $4 per acre was S125 per acre That man is still farming.
 One of Uncle Sans clerks has bought 1900 acres within % miles of the national capital, and he is putting 1t out in corn after the government methods. The land cost him s10 per acre, and it Is close to the railroad. within easy access to Washing ton, Baltimore. Philadelphia and New York. The scientists of the departmen, tell me that the land needs only cultiva- ton and the right crops to make 1t pro- duce as much corn as the best soil of IT, linois, Kansas or Iowa It Is within a half hours ride by rail from Washington city and it was bought at a much lower price than that of the second-class lands of Texas or other states beyond the Mis- sissippi. / Another farmer was induced to cultivate five-eighths of an acre of cotton after government methods. His plantation was then producing something like 200 pounds of lint to the acre. He began the experi- ment in 1908, at which time he could not afford to send his children to school. He succeeded so well that in 1900 he planted his whole plantation that way and raised 12O0 pounds of seed cotton per acre. He also tried corn, raising as much as 15O bushels on single acre of ground. It Is now two years and that man has paid all his debts and has money in the bank. His boys are in the high school and his daughter has gone to college.
 One of the most important features of this revolution Is the work, being done by the boys. At the present writing the government has on it's rolls s0,000 southern boys, each of whom is now cultivating one acre of corn under government directions. These boys are in 700 or 800 different coun-
 ties, covering all the states of the south.
 They belong to corn clubs which have