86 BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. 



Unaffected by cropping. Where the soil has great natural 

 strength, you cannot permanently exhaust it ; you may get it 

 down to a point where production is unremunerative, you 

 may say your land, once good, is " exhausted," but a skillful 

 farmer will take hold of it, and by the use of some judiciously 

 selected fertilizer, and the application of well-directed labor,' 

 he will bring up this exhausted soil in a short time, and make 

 a profitable farm of it. It only needs a little " condition" to 

 reestablish its good name. '•' Condition" itself, however, is a 

 thing which is easily run through with. You may take a 

 poor, light soil, and make it productive by the application of 

 manure and by careful tillage, but if you stop there, and un- 

 dertake to work on that capital, you will find that it deterio- 

 rates rapidly. You will have to come down to the natural 

 strength, and if that be small, your crops will correspond. 



To illustrate further what "condition" means, take the 

 case of those fields of Mr. Lawes, the natural strength of 

 which was measured by a yield of 16 bushels of wheat, or 20 

 bushels of barley, or 2600 lbs. of hay, through a number 

 of years. He took a portion of that land and put on it annu- 

 ally, fourteen tons of yard manure, to the acre, and during 

 the nineteen years in which he carried on that process simply, 

 he got 36 bushels of wheat per acre, as the average, some 

 years a little more and some years a little less, and one or two 

 years a good deal less than this quantity, on account of 

 some peculiarity in the season. On another field of the same 

 land, where he put four hundred pounds of ammonia-salts — 

 sulphate of ammonia, I believe, mainly — he also raised annu- 

 ally, SB bushels of grain. On another field, where he applied 

 fourteen tons of stable dung, he got 48 bushels of barley, on 

 the average, for nineteen years. The annual use of stable 

 manure in this quantity, and the annual addition of a certain 

 number of pounds of salts of ammonia, raised the crop of 

 wheat from 16 bushels to 36 bushels, and kept it steadily at 

 that point for nineteen years ; so that the difference between 

 16 and 36 bushels, that is, 20 bushels, was the crop v. Inch was 

 produced from that field by the use of fourteen tons of stable 

 manure in one case, and four hundred pounds of salts of am- 



