88 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



the work of the study of the then very inferior commercial fertilizers upon 

 the market, with Prof. Johnson of Yale — many of you have read "Johnson's 

 Agricultural Chemistry " — and with Dr. Jenkins, his predecessor at the head 

 of the Connecticut station, I have been in close touch in a general way with 

 the very early use of commercial fertilizers and as studied on a large scale 

 by them. Also one of my near neighbors, a thoughtful farmer, reading years 

 ago of some French experiments with various chemicals agriculturally, I 

 had the opportunity when a very small boy of knowing of his going to the 

 nearby drugstore and buying the chemicals, such as you would find at a 

 drugstore — potash, phosphoric acid — and experimenting with those on his 

 land for growing crops. I can assure you it was not a profitable industry 

 so far as those chemicals were concerned, paid for at drug store prices, and 

 as far as the crops were concerned, but it was profitable as to his develop- 

 ment as an agriculturist, and to my early schooling in the use of agricultural 

 chemicals. 



My farm at home was not naturally grass land, and if it had been I guess 

 we were too poor in the early days to have many cattle to feed thereon; we 

 never had cattle to any extent in the early time; and as we increased our 

 plantings it became necessary of course to feed them. You hear about the 

 so-called wornout soils of New England, but they are not as much worn out 

 as the men are worn out trying to handle them. But we never had the 

 amount of stable manure necessary for the proper plant food of the acreage 

 we had to till ; so that my earliest peach planting, and those ever since, for 

 the last forty years, have depended upon the commercial fertilizers that 

 were offered at the time. 



I do not say I am the first, but I know I am one of the first farmers in 

 America to buy nitrate of soda. I bought nitrate of soda. Brother Colling- 

 wood, when it was $70 a ton; I bought nitrate of potash at $100 a ton, ex- 

 perimented with it and got profitable results; and I have bought in large 

 quantities at $70 a ton and found it profitable. There isn't any question, 

 brother fruit growers, but what you can grow all the trees you want, both 

 vigorous trees and the fruitful ones, entirely on commercial fertilizers. 

 Prof. Hedrick told you yesterday about the hardiness of the peach depending 

 somewhat upon the solidity of the wood and the hardiness not only of the 

 tree but of the bud; and it is unquestionably true that you may grow a 

 tender fruit like the peach in a more trying situation, a more trying climate, 

 if you will build up the tree with the commercial fertilizers that are best 

 suited to grow a stocky, hardy, tough wooded tree. I am in the Connecticut 

 valley, where tobacco is grown more largely than any other crop, and they 

 have for years grown nothing but crops of tobacco on the same fields and 

 where they have depended on fertilizers alone and failed to plough in any 

 green crops there is unquestionably deterioration in soil; but where they 

 have added humus to the soil regularly year after year, there is a steady 

 improvement of the soil. We read once in a while of the continual wearing 

 out of the Connecticut soil by the growth of tobacco. It is not true, except 

 in the sense of where they have used commercial fertilizers alone ; but wherever 

 any green crops have been planted and ploughed under, and the commercial 

 fertilizers used, the lands are steadily increasing in productiveness. 



I have several hundred acres of land in Connecticut at the present time, 

 taken forty years ago as poor semi-abandoned, worn out Connecticut land, 

 and it is steadily increasing in its productiveness. We have many acres 

 of land in the east that produce from 100 to 120 bushels of shelled corn per 

 acre, that have been built up on commercial fertilizers and green crops and 



