FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 229 



change, and the boy who is not smart enough to take up some profession can- 

 not hope to succeed as a farmer. 



True economy in farming means taking advantage of everything that will 

 be a benefit, and letting alone those things that are not profitable. 



On most farms there should be some way of making manure, but there are 

 farms where it may not be necessary. In New York State, Mr. George Geddes, 

 who many of you know is the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, 

 has a farm, and on some of the fields no manure except the droppings of ani- 

 mals from occasional pasturing, has been applied for 40 years. Yet these 

 fields have always yielded good crops, and been increasing in productiveness, 

 so that now they produce from 30 to 40 bushels of wheat, and from two to 

 three tons of hay per acre. The fertility has been kept up and increased by 

 dressings of plaster, growing clover and occasionally plowing a crop under. 

 In talking with a gentleman last winter who had been traveling through some 

 of the Western States, he said he had visited a farm in Minnesota where they 

 had just harvested the twentieth successive crop of wheat, and the yield was 25 

 bushels per acre. I am told there are farms in this State, in the River Raisia 

 bottoms, that have been cropped for 25 years without manure and now yield 

 60 bushels of shelled corn to the acre. Now these are not examples of high 

 farming; they are what is called the impoverishing system, but you can readily 

 see that they are profitable. It is possible that light applications of manure on 

 such land would be a good investment, but it is doubtful if feeding stock on 

 such farms to make manure would pay, so long as the land will produce such 

 large crops. I don't believe in giving a strong healthy horse condition pow- 

 ders, nor in going to great expense to manure land that will produce good crops 

 either naturally or by growing clover, where land is worth no more than most 

 land in this State. 



We hear a good deal about the necessity of putting back on the laud in 

 manure what is taken off in the crop. The soil is compared to a grain bin, 

 and the idea is that if we keep taking out without putting none in it will soou 

 be exhausted and, to keep up the fertility, we must replace as much as we take 

 out. Manuring land profitably is not really furnishing food for wheat, corn, 

 or whatever the crop may be ; it is only giving the crop, or rather the soil, a 

 stimulant. The great bulk of what the plant takes up from the soil must be 

 in the soil already stored up in some form or other. We can't put into the soil 

 what the crop takes off and make anything at the business; the materials in 

 the manure would cost as much, or more, than the crop would fetch, at pres- 

 ent prices. 



We could not take a perfectly barren soil and grow a paying crop by apply- 

 ing manure. I know that often land that is too poor to grow a profitable crop 

 can be made profitable by applying manure, but the crop does not all come 

 from the manure ; there must be a good deal of fertility in the soil, and the 

 added manure gives the plant a start so that it may throw out roots to reach 

 matter that is in the soil, and it helps to put that matter in shape so that the 

 plant can take it up. We have no such thing as a perfectly barren soil; even 

 tiie poorest and lightest sand contains a large amount of plant food, but it is 

 in an insoluble condition, the plant can't get it; we put ou manure; it fur- 

 nishes some food for the plant and renders soluble a much larger amount of 

 plant food that is already in the soil. 



It requires a good deal of stv\dy to tell how best to get out what is in the soil. 

 In Enghind they use large quantities of the superphosphate of lime as a fer- 

 tilizer for the turnip crop, yet the turnip contains but a small amount of the 



