it was possible for a man to take land as poor as that, and make it produce so well.  We had some they could see that had not been touched.  As I told you, in eleven years we were out of debt.  After about ten or eleven years we were laying up a thousand dollars a year, above all living and running expenses, from this land, raising potatoes and wheat.  It doesn’t seem possible to you, large farmers, but you can’t get around the facts.  In 1883 we laid up $1,700 from the land.  But this was a little extra.

“We wanted to build a new house.  We had lived in the old shell long enough.  We had the money to pay cash down for the new house and to pay for the furniture that went into it.  We paid $3,500 cash down, that fall, for the house and furniture, and every dollar taken out of the land.  Only two or three years before that we paid the last of our debt.  I had not done any talking or writing to speak of, at that time.  I did not begin until 1882 I never went to an institute, and never wrote an article for a paper, except when called upon to do it.  I never sought such a job and prefer to stay at home on my farm.  It was only because I was called to do this work that I got into it.  For twenty-one years I was never at home one week during the winter season.  Farmers called for me and I didn’t feel that I could refuse to go.

“Now, how did we do it?  I told some of the things.  Let us go down to the science of the matter little, now.  I didn’t know anything about the science at the time.  That came later.  Practice came first.  We know now—­of course, you all know—­that clover has the ability, through the little nodules that grow on the roots, to take the free nitrogen out of the air to grow itself.  You know about four-fifths of the air you are breathing is nitrogen in the form of gas, and clover has the ability to feed on that and make use of it.  The other plants have not.  I might illustrate it in this way:  You can’t eat grass; at least, you wouldn’t do very well on it.  But the steer eats grass and you eat the steer, so you get the grass, don’t you?  Your corn, wheat, oats, timothy, potatoes, so far as we know, can’t touch free nitrogen in the air, but clover can and then feed it to those other crops.

“Let us look into how we got the phosphorus.  On land that would not grow over six to eight bushels of wheat per acre we have succeeded once in growing forty-seven and three-fourths bushels to the acre, on all the land sowed, of wheat that sold away above the market price and weighed sixty-four pounds to the measured bushel, and never put on a pound of phosphorus.  We got it from that tillage we told you about.  Our land in northeastern Ohio is not very good naturally.  It is nothing like what you have in this state.  Most of you know that is the poorest land we have in the state in general, but we have a fair share of clay and sand in ours.  That has helped us wonderfully.  We have clay enough so that with our tillage we can make so far all the plant food available we want.