Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 223, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1917 — Pleased With the Southern Crops. [ARTICLE]

Pleased With the Southern Crops.

Through the kindness of Dr. Washburn, we are enabled to publish the following extracts from a personal letter ’received by him from Omar C. Ritchie, a former resident of Jasper county, but now located in Louisiana near the Mississippi line: My Dear Ira: Your letter received and glad to hear from you again. We did not know whether you had forgotten us, had been sent “to de wah” or had sickened of the climate of Jasper county and had quietly folded your tent and hied away to the more salubrious climate of our neighboring state, Mississippi. Yes, we redd of your having frost on September 11th and of your going with your county demonstration agent to your place to estimate damage. I sure am glad it was so slight. Just at that time we enjoyed cool breezes from the North, and I said to others, “I’ll bet there has been p heavy frost in old Indiana. It just feels like it.” You ask how lam coming on. I am glad to say “I am coming back.” In the first place, my 100 acres of oats yielded 3,800 bushels of the cleanest, finest- quality, weighing 37 pounds to the measured bushel, as they ran from the machine spout. I sold 1,500 bushels of them for seed, to farmers at Crowley, La., on the Gulf coast, a small car load for SI,BOO, or $1.20 per bushel, they paying the big freight. I want to sell about 1,200 bushels more at $1.25 and think I will, as the kind that grow and produce here are scarce, mostly winter killed last winter, and northern oats do no good here. Owing to the long summer drouth, my early planted corn is very light in yield, but good quality. Am gathering and cribbing now. Will have enough so that I will not have to buy next summer. I planted velvet beans in my corn. You should see those beans on those vines. It is a pleasant sight and I’ll try them again. They are said to be the greatest fertilizer known and will

produce as many bushels of beans to the acre, in addition, as corn will make 4e-the acre* -— ~ as= TT’ L ~mi But my cotton is best of all. The drouth that injured the corn so bad, just made the cotton. All my land is making from one-half to one bale per acre v My own individual crop of 27 acres is beating my best “niggfer” tenants, and it bores them, for they thought they knew it all about raising cotton, and the “old man” didn’t know a little bit, but I read up while they talked up, following instructions (without fertilizer) and showed ’em how to do it. It tickled me. That little 5-acre field west of my little pasture lot, was picked over last week and made 6,550 pounds of seed cotton, equal when ginned to four bales of lint cotton worth SSOO and two tons of cotton seed worth $l4O, 1% bales equal to $187.50, 1 ton of cotton seed worth S7O, making a total of $187.50. I will have two more pickings of it which will yield from 1% to 2 bales more of cotton, beside one ton of seed worth S7O. What do you think of that for land that, will not sell for SSO per acre, because the d d fools in the north and west think they can beat it raising corn and wheat on S2OO per acre land. Too silly to talk about. “Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise ” But you get wise, Ira, and sell your farm and come down here before these people wake up, and get you some of this good land at one-fourth the cost of yours, that will produce as much, or more You are right. This is a cattle countryand now is the time to get into it. Last Friday I sold off my pasture (which is the poorest I ever saw it, because of the drouth), four yearling steers and five two-year-old steers, fat little chunks, nine in all, and the nine averaged me $56.78 per head and none of them ever had a “nubbin” of corn, silage or anything but a little oats straw and ordinary hay, last winter. Can you beat that on S2OO land? , Only last week, “Weccamo” Plantation, about the size of mine, sold for $50,000, and the big “Whitehall” plantation, about 2,500 acres, two miles below Vidalia, sold to a Delta planter for $140,000. P OMAR C. RITCHIE, L’Aregent, La.