I

THE BELGIAN FARMER

Leaving Holland with regret, we crossed the Schelde into Belgium, the
cockpit of Europe. It is here that one sees what intensive farming is
like. No fences to occupy space, no animals roaming at large, nothing
but small strips of land tilled to the utmost, chiefly by hand. Little
machinery is used, and much of the work is done after primitive
fashions; but the land is productive, and it is worked to the top of its
bent.

The peasant-farmer soils his cows, his sheep, his swine, in a way that
is economical of space and food, if not of labor, and manages to make a
living and to pay rent for his twenty-acre strip of land. His methods do
not appeal to the American farmer, who wastes more grain and forage each
year than would keep the Netherlander, his family, and his stock; but
there is a lesson to be learned from this subdivision and careful
cultivation of land. Belgian methods prove that Mother Earth can care
for a great many children if she be properly husbanded, and that the
sooner we recognize her capacity the better for us.

Abandoned farms are not known in Belgium and France, though the soil
has been cultivated for a thousand years, and was originally no better
than our New England farms, and not nearly so good as hundreds of those
which are practically given over to "old fields" in Virginia.

It is neglect that impoverishes land, not use. Intelligent use makes
land better year by year. The only way to wear out land is to starve and
to rob it at the same time. Food for man and beast may be taken from the
soil for thousands of years without depleting it. All it asks in return
is the refuse, carefully saved, properly applied, and thoroughly worked
in to make it available. If, in addition to this, a cover crop of some
leguminous plant be occasionally turned under, the soil may actually
increase in fertility, though it be heavily cropped each year.

It would pay the young American farmer to study Belgian methods, crude
though they are, for the insight he could gain into the possibilities of
continuous production. The greatest number of people to the square mile
in the inhabited globe live in this little, ill-conditioned kingdom, and
most of them get their living from the soil. It has been the
battle-field of Europe: a thousand armies have harrowed it; human blood
has drenched it from Liege to Ostend; it has been depopulated again and
again. But it springs into new life after each catastrophe