186 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



crop. The third year they get another crop, and after that, it is 

 cheaper to abandon that field, and to clear another. The first 

 piece grows up to forest, and in six, eight or ten years, perhaps, 

 they can burn it over again. Here, the fertility of the soil after 

 burning is a "condition" which is produced partly by natural 

 means, the growth of the forest, which brings up matters from 

 below, and partly by artificial means, the felling and burning of 

 the forests, restoring those matters to the surface. 



" Natural strength " is something which is comparatively un- 

 affected 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 pro- 

 ductive by the application of manure and by careful tillage, but if 

 you stop there, and undertake to work on that capital, you will 

 find that it deteriorates rapidly. You will have to come down to 

 the natural strength, and if that be small, your crops will corre- 

 spond. 



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 bar- 

 ley, or 2600 lbs. of hay, through a number of years. He took a 

 portion of that land and put- on it annually, 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 quan- 

 tity, on-account of some peculiarity in the season. On another 

 field of the same land, where he put four hundred pounds of am- 

 monia-salts — sulphate of ammonia, I believe, mainly — he also 

 raised annually, 36 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 num- 

 ber of pounds of salts of ammonia, raised the crop of wheat from 



