"Now friends, that was the farm we moved onto and the condition it was in. Some of you will know we saw some pretty hard times for a while. Time and again I was obliged to take my team, after we got two horses (the second I borrowed of a relative, it was the only way I could get one), and go to town to do some little job hauling to get some money to get something to eat. That is the way we started farming. I remember, after three or four years, meeting Dr. W. I. Chamberlain. Some of you know him. He said: 'Terry, if you should get a new hat, there wouldn't anybody know you. Your clothes wear like the children of Israel's.' They had to wear. No one knew how hard up we were. It was not best to let them know. That money was borrowed of a friend in Detroit, secured on a life insurance policy. We did not let anybody know how hard up we really were. My wife rode to town (to church when she went), in the same wagon we hauled out manure in, for a time. Time and again she had been to town when she said she could not do without something any longer and came back without it. Credit was good. We could have bought it. We didn't dare to. "Now, friends, a dozen years from the time we started on that farm, under these circumstances, we were getting from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty bushels of merchantable potatoes per acre right along--not a single year, but on the average--varying, of course, somewhat with the season. We were getting from four to five tons of clover hay in a season, from two cuttings, of course, per acre. We were getting from thirty-three to thirty-eight bushels of wheat per acre, not one year, but for five years we averaged thirty-five bushels per acre, and right on that same farm. No fertility had been brought on to it, practically, from the outside. A man without any money, in debt for the land $3,700, was able to do this. Now, how did he do it? That is the question I have been asked to talk upon. I have told you briefly something like what we have accomplished. I might say, further, the old house I told you that we lived in for fourteen years while we were building up the fertility of this soil, we sold for $10, after we got through with it. It is now a horse barn on the farm of our next neighbor and has been covered over. "Eleven years from the time we started we paid the last $500 of our debt, all dug out of that farm, not $25 from any other source. Thirteen years from the time we started, we carried off the first prize of $50 offered by the State Board of Agriculture of Ohio, for the best detailed report of the best and most profitably managed small farm in the state,--only thirteen years from the time we started on that rundown land, and no fertility brought from the outside; without any money; and meanwhile we had to live.