No. 5. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 273 



them. Good laws can help our business ; bad laws can put us out of 

 business. Let us stand firmly for the passage of laws which are just 

 and fair to all. A fruit grading and branding bill will be offered in 

 the present legislature. Let us see that this bill is shaped to meet 

 the needs of our fruit growers. Amendments will be offered to the 

 weights and measures act of 1913 session. Let us see that these 

 amendments really improve the act, then get behind them in no un- 

 certain way. It is manifestly unfair to demand in any law that a 

 definite weight be given for a standard bushel of apples. Bulk for 

 bulk, apples will vary nearly ten pounds to the bushel, depending on 

 varieties and stage of ripeness. All of these things point to the real 

 business end of our business and carry out the thought with which 

 I opened this report. 



REPORT OF THE CHEMIST 



By DR. WILLIAM FREAR. 



THE POTASH QUESTION. 



The farmers, truckers, orchardists and florists of Pennsylvania 

 have come to use very large quantities of commercial fertilizer. The 

 cultivated areas of the State are being more intensively farmed, so 

 that, although the expansion of cities and towns, the outward move- 

 ment of industrial plants, and the abandonment of occasional out- 

 Ijdng farm enterprises near lumbering operation, wlien the timber has 

 been cut off and worked up, have very slightly reduced our farm acre- 

 age during the past decade, the demand for fertilizing materials has 

 increased. Our systems of animal husbandry are also undergoing 

 a very considerable change. The pasture is being used less, the barn 

 more, and new manure saving devices are more generally used. That 

 means more manure, to the head of the livestock kept, that is avail- 

 able for plow land. On the other hand our numbers of livestock are 

 decreasing, not only relatively to our increasing population, but ab- 

 solutely. 



For fifty years, manure has been more and more substituted by 

 commercial plant foods. The possibility of such substitution to- 

 gether with labor scarcity, and the increasing uncertainty of direct 

 profit in the finishing of beef cattle, has doubtless had much to do 

 with the gradual decrease in farm animals as compared with the 

 total farm areas. In many cases, the system of farm management is 

 such as to place only a minor dependence upon stable manure and to 

 use commercial fertilizers as the direct manurial supply for half or 

 more of the crops. That is one of the reasons why our annual bill 

 for commercial fertilizers is running up from seven to eight millions 

 of dollars a year; and also why we look with concern upon any 

 change in economic conditions that seriously affects any part of the 



18—5—1914 



