Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/65

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I purchased a farm in southern Illinois ten years ago at a cost of less than $20 an acre. It comprised about 300 acres of poor gray prairie land (the commonest type of soil in about twenty counties in that part of the state) and a few acres of timber land. It was christened "Poorland Farm" by others who knew of its impoverished condition.

In 1913 a 40-acre field of this farm produced 1,320 bushels of wheat. This particular forty acres was bought at $15 an acre. It had been agriculturally abandoned for five years prior to 1904, and was covered with a scant growth of red sorrel, poverty grass and weeds.

During the ten years this field has been cropped with a rotation including one year each of corn, oats (or cowpeas) and wheat, and three