f the soil, but on the
hills and in the higher regions the soil-depth is very much less than
four feet, and the danger of waste much more serious. There are parts of
the earth that were once almost as fertile as ours where great cities
once stood, but where now nothing is left but the bare rock.

So we know that the end is sure, even for the life of man upon earth,
unless we learn to conserve our soil.

The value of our farm crops can not be overestimated. In food value they
are the life of the nation; in money value, our greatest national
wealth. For the year 1909 the total value of farm products was the
amazing sum of $8,760,000,000. It may give some idea of this vast amount
to say that if we could have it in the form of twenty-dollar gold
pieces, stacked in one pile, the column would reach seven hundred miles
high. If they were laid flat, edge to edge, they would extend from
Alaska to the Panama Canal, with enough left over to reach from New York
to San Francisco. If the money could be distributed, it would give us
all, every man, woman and child in the United States, one hundred
dollars apiece. The corn crop was worth $1,720,000,000; the cotton
$850,000,000; wheat comes third with a value of $725,000,000; then come
hay, oats, and other crops in vast amounts worth hundreds of millions of
dollars. The cotton alone was worth more than the world's output of gold
and silver combined. The corn would pay for the Panama Canal, for fifty
battleships, and for the irrigation projects in the West, with a hundred
million dollars left over.

And this is all new wealth. If we build a house, we have gained the
house, but the trees of which we build it are gone. The same thing is
true of every article we manufacture. Something is taken from our store
in the making. But after we have taken these wonderful crops from our
farms the land is still there, and the soil is just as ready to produce
a good crop the next year, and the next, and the next, if we treat it
properly.

This matter of soil conservation is of the greatest importance to every
one of us. If you are to own a farm, or rent a farm, or till a garden,
or plant an orchard ten years from now, it will make a great difference
to you whether the man who owns it from now until then knows how to care
for it so as to make it produce well, or whether, by neglect, he allows
it to become poorer each year. It will make a far greater difference if
twenty years elapse.

It makes a d