12 THE BOOK OF ENSILAGE. 



head yearly. While this is so, that ninety-eight per cent 

 of the cows yield less value in milk than it costs to feed 

 them, still as a choice of evils farmers are obliged to 

 keep them rather than sell the provender they consume, 

 though it would bring more money than the milk. By 

 gratuitously incorporating a large amount of labor ir\to 

 the milk, they are enabled to keep up the fertility of 

 their farms, while on the other hand were they to sell 

 their forage they would soon impoverish their land. 



Paradoxical as it may seem, the only way the majority 

 of farmers near our large cities can make (?) any money 

 is, and has been, to sell milk at less than it cost to pro- 

 duce it ! This is a very unsatisfactory condition of 

 affairs. 



For several years I have been anxiously looking for 

 science to show us agricultural laymen the way 

 out of the wilderness into the promised land, where 

 crops could be grown at a profit without the farmer's 

 labor being thrown in as straw quantum sufficit is 

 when figuring up the cost of wintering stock in the 

 West. 



Analyses of the soil at one time promised to bring 

 about a great change in agriculture, by showing us just 

 what the soil lacked to produce bountiful crops of what- 

 ever we wish to raise. This proved an ignis fatuus, 

 for nearly all soils were found to contain when chemically 

 analyzed every thing required to produce scores of 

 bountiful crops of almost every thing. 



The trouble was, that while the elements of fertility 

 were there chemically, they were not there in such a 

 form as the growing plant could avail itself of. 



The next great panacea was to analyze the crop which 

 it was proposed to raise, and apply to the soil the various 

 elements found in the crop, principally nitrogen, phos- 



