440 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Still another draws it out and enriches a spot here and there beneath the 

 piles that have been allowed to stand a month or more. vSo take it all in all 

 it is an exceedingly difficult matter to apply barn-yard manure evenly and to 

 place it in the soil just where it will do the most good. 



The farmer who uses a commercial fertilizer finds no such difficulties beset- 

 ting his labors, for it is a comparatively easy matter to drill the fertilizer in 

 at the time the grain is sown, or it may be readily sown broadcast and then 

 dragged in. The question of depth is not important, anywhere from ^ to 8 

 inches will do. 



In planting grain or seeds of any kind a little care will place the fertilizer 

 just where it will do the plant the most good, and the proper amount can be 

 used, since the food is homogeneous, every spoonful having exactly the same 

 composition as every other spoonful. This is the most commendable feature 

 of a commercial fertilizer as plant food. Again, while a barn-yard manure 

 unless well rotted is slow to act, and often comes struggling in with a vigor- 

 ous but frost-bitten growth in the autumn, the commercial fertilizer with 

 the true, pushing, wide-awake, American spirit, has set about its work in the 

 morning of the plant's life, and maintaining the vantage ground thus gained, 

 carries off the laurels at the winning stake in a well developed, fully matured 

 and early ripened crop. Then again, the farmer of to-day draws from the 

 village a quart of vital weed-seed with every load of manure and scatters it 

 broadcast over the field. To-morrow he shoulders his hoe and from morn- 

 ing's dawn to evening's darkness with perspiring brow, he fights his inveterate 

 foe the weeds. Day after day the battle wages, yet still with the gathering 

 in of the harvest enough weeds have escaped his battle ax to abundantly seed 

 the soil for a renewed conflict the next year. The farmer of the future, with 

 his load of commercial fertilizers applied in the spring, during the hot days 

 of summer, while sitting on his porch, will gaze 



Upon dark fields of waving green, 

 Where not a festive weed is seen. 



THE USE OF COMMERCIAL FERTILIZERS. 



In several of the leading experiment stations in the United States thorough 

 and exhaustive experiments extending through a series of years have been 

 tried to determine if possible the effect of commercial fertilizers on the growth 

 of all agricultural crops. The results show that all crops, without exception, 

 are benefited by the use of these fertilizers. The experiments of the New 

 Jersey experiment station show that the yield of wheat was increased nearly 

 300 per cent, or 21-^ bushels to the acre, by the use of 350 pounds of super- 

 phosphate. The cost of the fertilizer was $5.25; the value of the increase 

 was §17.25 ; profit per acre $12. The same series of experiments show that 

 corn was increased 18 per cent, and clover 20 per cent. These figures are 

 valuable, however, only for that particular locality; in other places of the 

 United States with different soil and climate the increase in the crop might 

 vary all the way from per cent to 500 per cent, and it is not wise for any 

 fertilizer company to claim any particular increase in the crop by the use of 

 a certain brand of fertilizer, for the farmer may use the fertilizer and not get 

 the claimed increase, and forthwith the fertilizer and the company that man- 

 ufactured it are condemned as a fraud, while the company may be strictly 



