N' . 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. ' 489 



PRACTICAL E)XPERIMKNTS IN THK RESTORA- 

 TION OF WORN OUT SOILS. 



KY K. F. SCUWAliZ, Analomink, Monroe County. 



We have all heard, and some of us have seen a few of them, of 

 the abandoned farms of New England; farms, which, while in times 

 past their owners were enabled from the proceeds of their product 

 to bring up generations of families in comparative comfort, have so 

 run down or because of the exhaustion or rather ill treatment of 

 their soil have become so unfertile that their last owners, unable 

 longer to make them pay, have forsakeii them for the poorhouse or 

 for some other pursuit. 



Pennsylvania, as waW as New England, though not to as great 

 an extent, has her abandoned farms, and has a still greater number 

 of farms which ought to be and will be abandoned unless their 

 owners pursue a more generous and intelligent course in the treat- 

 ment of their soil. The lesson must be learned that you can not 

 take something from nothing and that no matter how deep the well, 

 so soon as you take from it and keep on taking from it water beyond 

 its capacity to refill, so soon is that well bound to me exhausted. 

 We in the eastern States must learn that lesson now or in fact 

 should have learned it before now, but even the tillers of the seem- 

 ingly exhaust-proof rich soil of the western prairies will in time be 

 forced to learn it. 



Analysis of average soils shows us that there are stored in the 

 top twelve inches of earth suificient of nitrogen, of phosphoric acid 

 and of potash to last for hundreds and hundreds of 3'ears; the sole 

 question bei^ig as to how to make these valuable and necessary in- 

 gredients of plant growth, w'hich live there in a temporarily insolu- 

 ble state, available as plant food. 



While others have succeeded as well as have I, in restoring lands 

 of this description to a fertile condition, I may do some good by giv- 

 ing my experience in this line. I bought in 188S a farm of 38 acres, 

 wiiich had been cropped for many years by its previous owner who 

 had raised and brought up on it quite a large family of boys and 

 girls. After his death, the children having all moved away and 

 settled elsewhere the farm was for eight or nine years rented out on 



