EXTENSIVE, INTENSIVE FARMING. 37 



movement of the air and the oxygen and carbonic acid gases enter 

 it and set in play bacterial and chemical actions which decomposes 

 the soil and forms from it soluble plant food. Were it all soluble 

 now the hills would melt beneath our feet and we would soon be 

 swimming in a lake. Sturtevant found that a grass sward had 

 decomposed in it but three-tenths of a pound of nitrogen annually, 

 while a tilled section had 210 pounds made soluble in the same 

 time. Prof. Snyder showed that a virgin prairie soil contained 

 16,000 pounds of nitrogen in the first foot, while after nineteen 

 years of tillage it contained but 8,400 pounds. Admitted air 

 had done the work. Tillage is manuring, and in this country 

 of coarse granite soil, with practically six months of winter and 

 less sun than in other parts of the country, we should make the 

 most of tillage, and get these coarse soils decomposed by nature, 

 and secure much of our plant food from the soil rather than from 

 the yard and manufactory. This is why I till the land so much. 

 I want to form the nitrogen by disintegration and then put a 

 cover crop over it and take it up before it is wasted, as in con- 

 tinuous tillage. 



The second method of fertilizing is through irrigation. My 

 father fifty years ago formed a reservoir of forty acres, running 

 his canals a mile through the woods, and irrigated quite large 

 areas. Whenever water carrying materials in solution touches 

 the soil, it yields them up at once. Irrigation waters that come 

 to my soil part with the materials in them taken from drenching 

 the fields of others, and in that way we carry on two or three 

 hundred dollars worth of plant food every year. You have 

 places where you can dam back a little stream, or where you can 

 spread oyer the land waters of brooks that will bring you fer- 

 tility, and in times of drought double your crop, for irrigation 

 waters are an antidote to drought. 



The third method is by the use of muck. Your fathers, and 

 the fathers of New England and of the Middle States, for a 

 period of twenty or twenty-five years sought a solution of the 

 problem of soil fertility in the use of muck. They knew that 

 it was rich in nitrogen, and in accordance with this knowledge 

 put it in the yards as an absorbent, also under the cows and in 

 hog pens, and mixed manure and various substances with it. 

 But they recovered from the fever and abandoned its use. Muck 

 is formed under water in shallow places. Its potash and phos- 



