No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 277 



periment started at your own State College about 25 years ago, — 

 an experiment admirably planned, and which is now yielding re- 

 sults of incomputable value. But no single experiment is sufficient 

 to solve the problems of soil fertility for an entire state. Soils 

 vary widely in character, according to their origin and management, 

 and the only way in which the different types of soil can be effect- 

 ively studied is to go into the field and study them there. The 

 laboratories of the physicist, chemist and biologist are indispensable 

 to a thorough knowledge of the soil, but they can never take the 

 place of the field: and yet it is only within the last quarter of a 

 century that any systematic attempt at the field study of the soil 

 has been undertaken, excepting at the great pioneer experiment 

 station of Rothamsted. 



The commercial fertilizer is an outgrowth of chemical investiga- 

 tion, and abundant field experience has confirmed the chemist's 

 announcement that this fertilizer may be substituted for the man- 

 ure of the farm, but when we count up the cost of making in 

 chemicals a complete substitution for farm manure we find that too 

 meager a margin is left for profit. 



The Ohio Experiment Station has carried on several series of ex 

 periments in the use of fertilizers and manures on crops grown in 

 systematic rotations. In one of these experiments, located on the 

 farm of the main station at Woovster, on a soil peculiarly responsive 

 to the action of fertilizers and manure, there has been produced, 

 from one of the treatments, a 14-year average increase to the value 

 of about eight dollars and a half per acre annually in a rotation of 

 corn, oats, wheat, clover and timothy. The cost of the fertilizer pro- 

 ducing this increase has amounted to |23.00 for each 5-year rota- 

 tion, or a little more than four dollars and a half annually, thus 

 leaving a net profit of four dollars per acre, or enough to pay the 

 rental of the land. I know of no similar test in which results equal 

 to this have been attained for so long a period. But on the same 

 farm stable manure, used on a rotation of corn, wheat and clover, 

 at the rate of eight tons per acre every three years, has produced 

 increase to the value of more than twelve dollars annually, or more 

 than four dollars and a half for each ton of manure. In other words, 

 eight tons of manure has produced an incroavse greater by 50 per 

 cent, than that obtained from a fertilizer costing |23. 



It is true that manure is not always produced without cost, but 

 the expert feeder expects that in the average the increase in value 

 of the animal fed will pay for the feed and care, leaving the manure 

 free of cost. And this very fact that the manure is looked upon as 

 a product that has cost nothing, leads to neglect in its management, 

 so that a very large proportion of the manure produced on our 

 farms is lost before it ever reaches the field. 



We feed in Ohio a great many cattle that are brought in from 

 the West to be fattened on our corn. These cattle are usually fed 

 in open feed-lots and the manure accumulates in great piles, en- 

 tirely exposed to the weather. We have found it very hard to con- 

 vince our farmers that manure exposed in this way suffers very 

 serious loss. They see but a comparatively small reduction in the 

 size of the heap; they see no brown colored stream running from it, 

 and they think that they have as much material to haul to the field 



