40 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



of cottonseed. I buy these products because I get from them 

 nitrogen for my farm for nothing. My cows pay the full price 

 of the food, taking out twenty per cent and leaving eighty per 

 cent to be returned to the soil. I have bought cottonseed meal 

 and used it as a direct source of nitrogen. When I first returned 

 from the West I used a car that way because I came in the spring 

 when it was too late to feed it. Now all protein foods are first 

 fed. I advise you to buy this class of foods because you get 

 the nitrogen, and get it for nothing, as good breeders and feeders 

 make the cow pay the full bill. 



Lastly, in this direction, I urge upon you the use of chemical 

 manures. You say they are stimulants, forcing the soil to great 

 results and then leaving it in a collapse, like a man who takes 

 whiskey. If anything is demonstrated in the realm of agri- 

 culture it is that chemicals are plant food. Out of barren sand 

 you can grow a fine crop that will mature its seed and grow 

 another crop by the use of these materials. It has been done 

 again and again. For twenty-eight years I have grown a trial 

 acre of grass with no other fertilizer but chemicals and the past 

 year it gave me two tons to the acre, after twenty-eight years 

 without barnyard manure and twenty-four years in succession 

 in the application of chemical manures. John B. Laws for sixty 

 years has grown'crops of wheat which yielded about forty bushels 

 to the acre, by the use of chemicals, a little larger yield than 

 where he used fourteen tons of barnyard manure . annually. 

 Chemicals are plant food. Accept that as one of the conclusions 

 of the latter part of the nineteenth century. Are they profitable 

 plant foods ? I purchase mine in the form of phosphate, muriate 

 of potash and nitrate of soda, by the carload, and in that way 

 they do not cost me within about forty per cent of what they 

 cost you in the form of mixed fertilizers. I tried an experiment 

 on the N. H. state farm with these three materials on many plots 

 of corn. On the first plot I put potash, phosphoric acid and 

 nitrogen, and obtained sixty-two bushels to the acre. On the 

 second I put potash and phosphoric acid, leaving out the nitrogen, 

 and the result was a small decrease in the crop. On the third 

 plot I left out the phosphoric acid, with almost no decrease of 

 crop, and on the fourth the potash was left out and the crop utterly 

 collapsed, falling to the ground and yielding twenty-one bushels 

 per acre. It was a river-made soil out of which the potash had 



