SOIL EXHAUSTION. 73 



what his sand farm would, I can raise euougti on the sand farm to pay for 

 the clay farm. I am a Dutchman. 



President Willits asked how to make one part of a field equal another, 

 se a fertilizer; charcoal, vegetable mould from the forest, leaves with lime, 

 hes, plaster to make seed catch, and sow the large clover, because its roots 

 will penetrate the farthest, and hence do more good than the small clover. 

 Wm. Ball, Hamburg: I agree with last speaker. I think he will make 

 his farm pay. I was born on a heavy clay farm in New York State and 

 reared on one in Washtenaw county, part of which was heavy clay and am 

 now on a farm having all kinds of soil and I like them all. It is true that 

 jou could buy a clay farm with the produce from a sand while you were 

 getting a clay farm ready to produce. It is also true that a clay farm 

 has more strength in it, but it is harder to get it out. Larger crops of wheat 

 can be raised from clay well tilled than from sand well tilled, and of corn 

 from sand well tilled than from clay well tilled, and of barley from a mixed 

 loam. As a balance sheet of the whole, my experience has been that the 

 finest improvements are found on lighter soils. Clays holds out longer because 

 they have more originally and give it out more slowly. As to the clover. 

 On very strong land the heavy crop does fall and get wet and sour. The 

 suggestion to sow more seed is the true remedy. 



SOIL EXHAUSTION". 



BY H. A. LADD. 

 [Read before the Farmers' Institute at Grass Lake, February 16, 1886. 



The soil is a deep subject, and requires more than a pen to dig to the bot- 

 tom of it. But I will confine myself to the soils with which I am most 

 familiar, such as your farms around here are composed of, gravelly and sandy 

 soils. Heavy soils lose fertility, but they have plenty left, while a poor, 

 «andy soil doesn't have to lose much to become worthless. 



The general opinion, as to why these soils are so poor, is that the good- 

 ness leaches out of them, and the waters that soak into the earth carry it down 

 beyond the reach of plants. Now, as China is a very rich country, and as I 

 have been unable to discover any of this fertility any deeper than it has been 

 plowed, I have come to the conclusion that, if it does leach down, it must go 

 clear through and come out on the other side. Rather than accept that 

 explanation, I have abandoned the theory entirely. If the fertility does 

 leach down, it is in such small quantities that we need not try to prevent it. 

 I can find but three ways that vegetable humus, ov fertilizing matter, can 

 escape from the soil. One is by crops removed; but with a proper rotation 

 and mixed husbandry, this need not impoverish the soil. Another is, by 

 surface wash. Some idea of the importance of this cause of waste can be 

 gained when we think that, through the countless ages since creation, these 

 waters have been descending in the form of rain, washing the solul)le por- 

 tions of the hills into the hollows, and carrying it down unnumbered rivers, 

 to be lost in the sea, while the waters returned again for more. Scientific 

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