148 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



These are just the things which the business farmer, as 

 distinguished from the mere tiller of the soil, must study and 

 must determine in order to make a success. The man who 

 masters these things is, I believe, as likely to succeed in 

 farming today as in any other business. The one who will 

 not or cannot master them is bound, sooner or later, to fail. 



Long ago we were working unexhausted soils, we had a 

 constantly widening market, and little competition. The art 

 of agriculture was, pure and simple, the art of growing crops, 

 of sowing and reaping. Now it is the art of meeting competi- 

 tion in our home markets from lands scarcely known to our 

 forefathers, the art of lessening our cost of production, of 

 finding out just what our cost of production is, and the study 

 of market conditions to decide what we can and cannot profit- 

 ably raise. To lessen our cost of production and to improve 

 the quality of our products are the two main avenues to suc- 

 cess in farming today, as in any other business. 



Of one way to lessen the cost of production I wish to 

 speak here, and that is, in the matter of commercial fertilizers. 

 There is room for a great improvement in the usual way, both 

 of buying and of using them. In Connecticut we are yearly 

 paying over one million dollars for commercial fertilizers ; 

 that is, about one per cent, of the gross value of our farm 

 products. The proportion is not too large perhaps. I be- 

 lieve that all the fertilizer used in Connecticut could be used 

 profitably, and more beside, but that not nearly all of it is so 

 used. The loss does not come to any degree from worthless 

 or fraudulent fertilizers — they have been driven out and are 

 kept out — but in two different ways : First, in using com- 

 mercial fertilizers where they cannot be used to a profit, and 

 secondly, from an unbusinesslike way of buying, which par- 

 ticularly profits no one, but worries both the manufacturer 

 and the farmer, and is likely to cause misunderstanding and 

 bad feeling between them. 



In the first place, some of us have a wrong idea regarding 

 the use of fertilizers. It needs to be remembered that they 

 are not a medicine, a cure-all. As a rule they do not favor- 

 ably change the physical quality of the soil, and on unsuitably 

 prepared land they are worse than useless. They are no 

 substitute for drainage, or for thorough tillage, for rain or 

 sunshine. All these other things we must have before we 



