PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING 107 



we cultivate for the sake of enhancing the fertility of our soil, how is it 

 the cullivatefl fields are eonstantl.y decreasing in this very fertility, until 

 finally they become unprofitable for us to work? Is not that true all 

 ov(;r? 



Take another case. You remember thirty years ago, perhaps, you went 

 to some location and you had a "raising" and built two barns. In the 

 corner of these two barns, where they came together, you remember there 

 was a place where they had thrown out dirt from the basement. It was 

 bare and barren, that little corner between the two barns, an unproductive 

 piece of ground. Now, there are some uses that such corners are usually 

 put to that might account for their increasing fertility, but assume a case 

 where that is not so, and we find that that has been occupied by grasses, 

 fi[rst hj summer grasses and then burdocks have grown in, and it has not 

 been cultivated; but vear after vear that soil has been covered, and todav, 

 if your wife wants to get some soil to put in her flower-pots, or if you want 

 a little soil that is ideal in its character, you go to that point between the 

 barns, on a piece of land that has been cultivated less than any part of 

 your garden. I call to mind that in Detroit there is a little space on 

 Farnsworth street between the fence and a building. It is a little space 

 that is annually covered until late in the season with all sorts of weeds, 

 there is a great mass of weeds covering it completely. If I wanted to get 

 some soil, a small quantity, to put in a pot, I would go there, where it 

 has not had any cultivation. 



Why is it? It seems to me that there must be some point here that 

 we miss. Why is it that a covering of one piece of ground with crops and 

 cultivating it, conserving its fertility, leaving a parallel piece or a part 

 of the same block in forest, that the forest grows richer and richer and 

 richer, and the other poorer and poorer and poorer? What is the differ- 

 ence between a piece of ground covered and shaded, as it is in our large 

 orchards, by apple trees, and a corresponding piece of ground right across 

 the fence, on the other side of the fence, in forest, one growing better and 

 the other growing poorer? It seems to me that somebody will suggest 

 quickly, "Why, the proposition is that in cultivating the ground you are 

 constantly taking from the soil the essential nitrogen, the potash, the 

 ammonia and phosphorus, that you are exhausting the soil by what you 

 are taking off." Prof. Wylie says that the estimated amount of potash 

 per acre in ordinary soil, to the depth of a foot, is fi9,000 pounds; that the 

 average farm crop removes from an acre annually close to 47 pounds 

 of potash. Other authorities make it 51 pounds of potash annually. 

 Forty-seven was the amount Mr. Wylie gave, I believe, for a crop of 

 wheat. I assume that ordinarily we have only about 50 pounds for an 

 ordinary average crop, of potash removed by each annual crop, and witti 

 69,000 pounds in an acre we can keep on year after year, taking off crop 

 after crop, without making any material exhaustion in the potash con- 

 tent of the soil. By that time the farmer will be dead, and w'e will all 

 be happy anyway, and we will not care. The idea that we simply exhaust 

 the soil by taking out these materials, it seems to me, is easily blown 

 away, and its weight is lost when we take into cognizance the enormous 

 quantity of all these valuable matters which analysis says exists there. 

 In California they have some lands which are practically barren, that 

 produce nothing, and yet their state chemist announces that they are 

 richer in potash and phosphorus, and even in nitrogen, than some of the 



