Food for man and beast may be taken from the
soil for thousands of years without depleting it. All it asks in return
is the refuse, carefully saved, properly applied, and thoroughly worked
in to make it available. If, in addition to this, a cover crop of some
leguminous plant be occasionally turned under, the soil may actually
increase in fertility, though it be heavily cropped each year.
It would pay the young American farmer to study Belgian methods, crude
though they are, for the insight he could gain into the possibilities of
continuous production. The greatest number of people to the square mile
in the inhabited globe live in this little, ill-conditioned kingdom, and
most of them get their living from the soil. It has been the
battle-field of Europe: a thousand armies have harrowed it; human blood
has drenched it from Liege to Ostend; it has been depopulated again and
again. But it springs into new life after each catastrophe, simply
because the soil is prolific of farmers, and they cannot be kept down.
Like the poppies on the field of Waterloo, which renew the blood-red
strife each year, the Belgian peasant-farmer springs new-born from the
soil, which is the only mother he knows.
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