CLOVER CULTURE. 147 



roots, he plants corn, wheat or flax on a similar soil that has 

 been cultivated some years and gives both plots the same 

 culture and care. The almost uniform answer of the soil in 

 such cases is, "I am hungry for nitrogen." If, however, he 

 will by the culture of clover and other legumes, fill his soil 

 with nitrogen and conserve the potash and phosphoric acid 

 by carefully husbanding the manure made on the farm, he 

 can maintain for an indefinite period the fertility of his farm 

 and be in a position to meet successfully the inevitable compe- 

 tition, whether from his neighbors, his own countrymen or 

 the grain growers of the civilized world. The nation that 

 can grow the great cereal products and transport them to the 

 world's markets at the smallest cost will eventually dictate the 

 price of bread. 



It is supreme folly for any man or any class of men to say 

 that his lands are inexhaustible. Many times in the history of 

 agriculture has that claim been made, and as often have those 

 wh'o have made it been brought to confusion by the dire 

 event. All that is needed to exhaust the fertility of any soil 

 for any cereal crop is to keep on growing that crop year after 

 year. It is quite true, as has been affirmed by Sir John B. 

 Lawes and other thoroughly scientific investigators, that it 

 is not possible to exhaust completely the capacity of any land 

 for the production of any one crop provided the soil is good 

 to begin with. Nature loves fertility and hoards it as a miser 

 does his gold. She parts with it slowly and reluctantly, 

 and as soon as 'she has allowed man to exhaust it to the 

 point where he cannot grow paying crops in competition with 

 better soils, and has thus driven him from his land, she at 

 once begins the work of soil restoration. 



The strict and accurate truth is that any soil may by con- 

 tinuous, cultivation in the cereals be so far exhausted of its 

 nitrogen or other elements of soil fertility, that the crops 

 grown on it are no longer profitable. When it reaches this 

 point of exhaustion and the farmer can no longer make a liv- 

 ing on his farm, it is for him practically exhausted. What 

 we mean, therefore, by soil exhaustion is not the complete 

 removal of one or all of the great elements of fertility, but 

 the reduction I of any one of them to a point where the soil 

 will not produce paying crops. Sir John B. Lawes has for 

 nearly forty years grown continuous crops of wheat on the 

 same land without manure, equal, even in late years, to the 

 average crop of the wheat-growing world, but it has been 

 done, by a system of thorough tillage, hand-hoeing and weed- 

 ing, which if done on a commercial basis would reduce the 

 owner to beggary. 



