1686 Report of Farmers' Institutes 



farmer. The market gardener, especially, finds it necessary to 

 locate himself near the city. lie must often use land not natur- 

 ally adapted for the growing of large and early crops of vege- 

 tables. By the use of enormous quantities of manure he attempts 

 to transform soil that is naturally compact and cold, into a warm, 

 mellow loam. Moreover, the value of his land is often so great 

 that he cannot afford to grow hut one crop in a season. He must 

 grow two or even three crops in one growing season, and has not 

 the opportunity to utilize green manures for restoring the vege- 

 table matter that is constantly decomposing and disappearing 

 from his fields. For him there is no other suitable source of or- 

 ganic matter. He applies not infrequently as many as forty or 

 even fifty tons of horse manure per acre in a single year, at a 

 cost startlingly great to the general farmer, but not excessive to 

 him whose crops may have a retail value of three or four hundred 

 dollars per acre. 



But while manure is worth much less for the general farmer 

 than it is for the trucker, it has even for him a value that is 

 quite considerable. It is estimated that the average dairy cow 

 will produce ten tons of manure in a single year. The average 

 horse or mule will produce five tons in one year. Hence it is 

 evident that on many farms there is produced one hundred, two 

 hundred, three hundred, or even five hundred tons of manure per 

 annum. This waste material may range in value from a few 

 dollars where only two or three animals are kept, to many hun- 

 dreds of dollars where large herds of cattle are kept. In its 

 aggregate, the value of the manure produced on the farms of the 

 United States rims into hundreds of millions. From the stand- 

 point of national economy we are dealing, therefore, w^ith a com- 

 modity of great signficance to the agricultural and likewise to 

 the urbfln communities. 



We come tlius to the very important question of the conser\'-a- 

 tion of the plant food contained in animal manures. We are no 

 longer strangers to the fact that improperly stored manure may 

 lose as much as one-half of its total plant-food value. When kept 

 in the open it loses a large portion of its valuable nitrogen com- 

 pounds by leaching. It loses still another portion, thanks to the 

 fermentation processes^ in the manure heap, and the resulting es- 



