SOII< SESSION. 157 



waste of the fields would be much more efficient as a fertilizer if it could 

 be first used as an absorbent, and to be most efficient when used in this 

 way it should be cut fine. Stable manure is but finely ground roughage, 

 saturated with the best kinds of plant food materials, but stock may be 

 made to sufficiently saturate two or three times the amount they will 

 eat, and thus increase the fertilizer product of the farm at least two- 

 fold. Nothing can increase the yield of the corn belt so much as to 

 shred or cut finely the stover, now wasted on so many fields, and make 

 it into manure by using it as feed or as an absorbent and then effectively 

 applying it to the fields. 



GOOD TILTH. 



Good tilth, or a thorough, deep and strong granulation, giving a 

 well marked crumb-structure, is the most important physical condition 

 of any soil. The great urgency of the crumb-structure in soil grows 

 out of the fact that in all but the coarsest sandy soils the individual 

 grains are so small that when they are not bunched together the capil- 

 lary pores are so minute as to make them like the potter's puddled clay, 

 nearly impervious to both air and water. But when the fine soil particles 

 are collected and more or less cemented into larger compound grains, 

 much as pop corn is made into balls, then there is opportunity for 

 the roots and the root hairs to advance between them, placing them- 

 selves so as to absorb the moisture and plant food materials which sur- 

 round and are contained within. Upon the surfaces of these com- 

 pound grains the microscopic soil organisms place themselves where 

 their products of decomposition have the best opportunity to act as a 

 solvent upon the soil and also where the products may easily diffuse into 

 and be retained by the granules against loss by leaching. 



When a soil is well and strongly granulated each compound grain 

 becomes like a tiny sponge, which may maintain itself full of water 

 highly charged with plant food materials, to be sucked out by the root 

 hairs when they develop alongside of them ; and hence, a strongly gran- 

 ulated soil has a greater capacity for both available soil moisture and 

 for plant food. It will be clear that where the soil is strongly granu- 

 lated, so that the larger particles have a sponge-like openness, these 

 will hold within themselves and away from their immediate surfaces 

 large amounts of plant food which cannot be so readily leached out, for 

 then the rains drop down rapidly through the larger passageways with- 

 out strongly affecting the solution that is within the granules them- 

 selves. Besides, where this structure exists and the action of the roots 

 has partly dried the granules out and at the same time removed a por- 

 tion of the plant food which they had stored, then when a rain does 



