Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1910 — LESSON FROM A MULE [ARTICLE]

LESSON FROM A MULE

Dakota (Farmer from “Down East*’ • -earned How to Raise Wheat at Critical Time. CROPS WERE ALL BURNED UP. Discovered the Efficacy of the Holler and Revolutionised Agricultural Methods. Twenty-five years ago, during the “dark days” of the west, when every :rop failed and thousands of settlers were returning “back east,” a discouraged farmer in South Dakota, looking over his ruined field for the last time before trekking back to Vermont, no-’ ticed that in the tracks made by his old lame mule, where the soil was packed by the weight of the animal, the wheat had grown strong and tall. As a result of this observation South Dakota now harvests one of the largest wheat crops of any state in the union, and is filled with prosperous farmers, while the erstwhile discouraged farmer himself, H. W. Campbell, is owner of five big wheat farms ag-. gregating 3,000 acres, which produce an average of sixty bushels an acre, says a Lincoln (Neb.) correspondent of the New York Herald. He is known as the “Bonanza Farmer” of the west. And all because a lame mule tramped across his wheat field one day. The good stalks of grain growing In the mule tracks and surrounded by puny stems set Campbell to thinking.

From it he evolved a new system of farming. His neighbors laughed at him and remained poor, while Campbell grew wealthy. When he wanted new tools with which to farm according to his- new ideas, the farm implement manufacturers made light of his ideas. Campbell made his own tools, and to-day they are being manufactured in Odessa, Arad, Hungard, Hyderabad and half a dozen cities in the United States. He wanted to tell the western farmers what he had discovered, so he turned editor and has had the satisfaction of seefng his articles reproduced in a dozen different languages. One of these, an article on soil value, \vas translated into Russian by Tschaikowsky, the Russian political writer, while he was a prisoner in the fortress of Peter and Paul at St. Petersburg. ’ E. H. Harriman, as he once passed through the great wheat country of the west, held out his hand to Mr. Campbell, who was in the railroad man’s private car, and said: “If the Union Pacific gave you sl,000,000 every year it could not pay you for its increased freight from your work.” • Mr. Campbell now lives in Lincoln, Neb., where he maintains a force of clerks to keep the accounts of his big farms and his other interests. And just twenty-five years ago this summer he had nothing but an ox and an old lame mule. When he walked out to look once more at his burned field, he noticed small bunches of good wheat. His curiosity was aroused. He examined carefully and found that these bunchcs were growing in the tracks, of the old mule. “What did it?” and finally the answer came to him. “It was the packing qf the earth by the weight of the mule?” The next year, when Mr. Camp Dell sowed his wheat, he rolled it with a h«me tsode roller for days and days. His neighbors laughed at him. When,the wheat sprouted every kernel came up, and' so did that planted by his neighbors, who again laughed at the “fool Vermont machinist who thinks he knows how to farm.” Then came the-long hot days and the -jeighbors’ wheat dried up and burned. But Mr. Campbell’s didn’t. His fields green, and in the time of harvest was found that he had raised the big-

SfMt crop that country ever saw. Htj theory had been proved, and the next year every farmer in that country packed his wheat ground down at the bottom of the furrowThat was the start. To-day Mr. Campbell owns and operates 1,000 acres In North Dakota, 640 acres In Midland County, Texas; 320 acres near Plainview, Texas; 320 at Holdredge, Neb.; 640 acres at Medicine Hat, Alberta, and a section in South Dakota. “And it all came about because say old mule walked across my wheat field twenty-five years ago,” ho says.