the natural phosphates, potash
and other minerals contained in the soil. The farmer has no more
important business than that of making plant food available,
especially by supplying liberal amounts of decaying organic matter.

The following suggestions are offered to the land owner:

To enrich the soil apply liberal amounts of limestone, organic
manures and phosphorus.

To enrich the seller apply small amounts of high-priced "complete"
commercial fertilizers.

Thus the average of seventy-three "Cooperative Fertilizer Tests on
Clay and Loam Soils," extending into thirty-eight different counties
in Indiana (Bulletin 155), shows 13 cents as the farmer's profit
from each dollar spent for "complete" fertilizers used for corn,
oats, wheat, timothy, and potatoes, if valued in the field at 40
cents a bushel for corn, 30 cents for oats, 80 cents for wheat, 50
cents for potatoes, and at $10 a ton for hay, over and above the
extra expense for harvesting and marketing the increase, and of
course the soil grows poorer, because the crops harvested removed
much more plant food than the fertilizers supplied.

CHAPTER IV

PERMANENT SOIL FERTILITY

Its Relation to Profits and Future Values

THOUGH intelligent soil improvement is the most profitable business
in which an honest man can engage, ordinary farming is not a highly
remunerative occupation, and to a large extent the fortune of the
farmer is bound up with the increase or depreciation in the market
value of his land. There are at least three important factors of
influence which induce people to continue farming:

First, the farmer is his own employer. He controls his own job, is
his own boss and has no superior officer to lay him off because of
disagreement, dull business or political preferment. Farmers
constitute by far the largest class of citizens who own their own
business, and are thus "independent."

Second, the farmer is able as a rule to make some sort of a living
for his family very largely out of the produce of the farm, so that
he gets some return for his labor in terms of food, even when there
is no profit in farming as a business; whereas the wage-earner of
the city, as soon as his wages stop and his savings and credit are
exhausted, must see his family supported by charity or starve. This
is not fiction, but fact.

Third, land is usually considered a safe investment, in which one
may hold a perfect and undivided title to his property; and people