“I’ll do that if I have to hire a brass band,” I said. But I didn’t need a brass band. With that prize money in prospect there wasn’t a man who dared stay away for fear the other fellow might secure an advantage over him. We had two lectures a week open only to members of the club. We tried to make them as informal as possible and at the conclusion of each talk threw the meeting open for questions. Holt took down each lecture in shorthand and I had a half dozen copies made at my own expense. We kept one of these for the club as a matter of record but the others were at Holt’s office where any member was allowed to take one for not over three days so that he might copy for himself anything he wished. It was surprising how soon those copies became thumb-marked and dog-eared. The speakers kept true to my requirements and followed substantially the outline laid out by Dennison at our first interview. The first speaker took up the matter of soil and had a difficult task on his hands to convince these men that not all dirt was soil and that not all soils were the same. “There’s as much difference in land as there is in stock,” he said. “And if you want the best returns you have to handle it just as tenderly and feed it just as properly. The next time you plant a cornfield don’t think of it as a field but as a well bred cow or horse. Groom it as you would groom your horse or cow and feed it with the same care. Remember, too, that just as you don’t expect your horse to give work or your cow to give milk without supplying the necessary material out of which to make work and make milk; you can’t expect your field to give you back corn unless you supply it with the material for making corn. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? The poor farmer is the only workingman in the world except the Wall Street sucker who expects to get something for nothing. Nature supplies most of the elements free of charge, but whatever you take out you have to put back.” Then he went on to explain how different soils need different foods just as much as different kinds of stock need different foods. “It all depends upon what you want to get back. If you want back eggs you use the food that will make eggs; if you want back fat you use the food that will make fat; if you want back milk, you use the food that will make milk, and so on. Now, some of your land is already adapted by nature to supply certain things--corn, wheat, hay, potatoes, what not. When that is so, use what is given you. If, however, the land hasn’t those elements you must supply them, either by fertilizers or by planting a preparatory crop that will use what is already present and leave behind what you want for the final crop.”