Your first principle will be agreed to and emphasized by all; but it should be kept in mind that the large farms are frequently better tilled than the small farms.  The $200 land in the corn belt is usually “worked for all that’s in it.”  It is tile-drained and well cultivated, and the best of seed is used.  If more thorough tillage would increase the profits, these corn-belt farmers would certainly practice it.

It ought to be known (1) that as an average of six years the Illinois Experiment Station produced seventy and three-tenths bushels of corn per acre with the ordinary four cultivation, and only seventy-two and eight-tenths bushels with additional cultivation even up to eight times; and (2) that the average yield of corn in India on irrigated land varies from seven bushels in poor years to twelve bushels in good seasons, and this is where the average farm is about three acres in size.

One Illinois farmer with a four-horse team raises more corn than ten Georgia farmers with a mule a piece on the same total acreage Fertile soil and competent labor are the great essentials in crop production.  A mere increase in country population does not increase the productive power of the soil.

The farms down here in “Egypt” average much smaller than those in the corn belt of Illinois, but our “Egyptian” farms are nevertheless poorly tilled as a rule and some of them are already becoming abandoned for agricultural purposes.

Certainly the land should always be well tilled, but tillage makes the soil poorer, not richer.  Tillage liberates plant food but adds none.  “A little farm well tilled” is all right if well manured, but it should not be forgotten that the men who consider “Ten Acres Enough” are market gardeners, or truck farmers, who are not satisfied until in the course of six or eight years they have applied to their land about two hundred tons of manure per acre, all made from crops grown on other lands.

All the manure produced in all the states would provide only thirty tons per acre for the farm lands of Illinois.  In round numbers there are eighty million cattle and horses in the United States, and our annual corn crop is harvested from one hundred million acres.  All the manure produced by all domestic animals would barely fertilize the corn lands with ten tons per acre if none whatever were lost or wasted; and, if all farm animals were figured on the basis of cattle, there is only one head for each ten acres of farm land in the United States.

Your second principle is, that “a proper three or five-year rotation of crops actually enriches the land.”