Charlevoix county herald. (East Jordan, Mich.) 189?-1953, 1915-07-03

of our manufacturers our population
must increase. With the increase in
population a larger supply of food
must be produced, or brought in from
outside, which means an increased
cost, and where is it to come from ?
With half of the world at war, de-
stroying crops, or consuming them,
the other half of the world must pro-
duce more food. For the last few
years we have been blessed with boun-
tiful crops, but history shows us that
droughts and crop failures do come
once in while, and when that dread
ed time shall reach our land, as it
sooner or later must, the demand for
food will become so great that the
high prices we are complaining Of to-
day will seem insignificant, and then
we shall realize that "All that a man
hath will he give for his life" and
the man who has the most money will
outbid the man who has none, and
buy wheat at $40 bushel, if he must
pay that price, but when that time
shall come there shall be somewhere a
little child, or frail woman, in some
of our great cities, who must die for
the lack of food, and for that little
child / have been laboring for these
past years.
| can never benefit in a financial
way so as to reimburse me for the
money have actually expended, but
if can bring to you men the realiza-
ton of the need for developing these
waste lands to supply food, and you,
with your great resources, enlist the
efforts of others, so that when the day
of famine arrives it shall be said,
There is food" not ain Egypt" but
"in Michigan" for those who other
wise must have starved, l shall be sat-
isfied.
But" you ask, "can these. sand
lands be made to produce food at a
profit? ?" and l answer, after careful
thought, and years of study, most en-
phatically, Eyes" "But how" you
ask, and in closing I wish to make a
few suggestions which I believe are
practical:
First, by proving in commercial
way, what plant foods are lacking
in these soils, and how they can be
supplied.
Second, by training men and women
to till these soils as thoroughly as we
are now training men for law, medi-
cine, or war, and then sending these
trained men and women out onto these
waste lands as teachers, to show 9TH
ers how maximum crops can be pro-
duced at minimum cost.
Third, by the land owners refusing
to sell their lands to men who have
not enough money to develop them, or
by developing their lands and then
selling them at higher price, to the
man who must earn his living by the
crops he can raise the first year.
But again you ask, "How can this
be done 2" There may be other and
better ways, but after much study l
should like to suggest that a stock
company be formed in which all of
the interested parties, that is, the land
owners, railroads, boat lines, manu-
facturers, and merchants, all who
would be benefited by such a develop
ment, take stock, that such a company
purchase land, such as you have seen
today, and which has long been con-
sidered valueless, so situated that it
can be easily reached by the city man,
or the farmer, that here 10-acre ex-
periments be conducted to find out the
actual amount of the different plant
foods necessary to produce profit
able crop, how to increase the fertility
of these soils at profit, to test out
the various makes of traction engines,
and new machinery which may be de-
veloped from time to time, that the
may have the benefit of
such information, and purchase the