If we retain the straw on the farm and sell only the grain, the
supply of potassium in the surface soil of Poorland Farm is
sufficient to meet the needs of a fifty bushel crop of wheat per
acre every year for nineteen hundred and twenty years, or longer
than the time that has passed since the Master walked among men on
the earth; whereas, the total phosphorus content of the same soil is
sufficient for only seventy such crops, or for as long as the full
life of one man. Keep in mind that Poorland Farm is near
Heart-of-Egypt, and that this is the common soil of our "Egyptian
Empire," which contains more cultivable land than all New England,
has the climate of Virginia, and a network of railroads scarcely
equalled in any other section of this country, and in addition it is
more than half surrounded by great navigable rivers.

On Poorland Farm there are seven forty-acre fields which are at
least as nearly level as they ought to be to permit good surface
drainage, and there is no need that a single hill of corn should be
omitted on any one of these seven fields; and I am confident that
with an adequate supply of raw phosphate rock and magnesian
limestone and a liberal use of legume crops this land can be made to
pay interest on $300 an acre.

Why not? At Rothamsted, England, they have averaged thirty-eight and
four-tenths bushels of wheat per acre during the last twenty years
in an experiment extending over sixty years, and they have done this
without a forkful of manure or a pound of purchased nitrogen. Why
not? The wheat alone from eighty acres of land, if it yielded forty
bushels per acre and sold at $1 a bushel, would pay nearly five per
cent. interest on $300 an acre for the entire two hundred and forty