233 



>."atioi], the greater Avill be the amount of pl^nt food made 

 available, but we may go beyond the jioint of economy and 

 "waste too great an amount of plant food. We know that 

 for every pound of nitrogen which we harvest in the crop, 

 the soil, under average conditions, loses another. If a crop 

 of wheat that you have harvested contains fifty pounds of 

 i-.itrogen, the soil will have lost a hundred pounds of nitro- 

 gen. You cannot utilize every particle of plant food that 

 becomes available, and we can go beyond the point of safety 

 so that for a number of years, if the soil is fertile, most 

 tfiorougli cultivation, will increase the available plant food 

 lo a point to give us much larger crops and then the soil 

 Avill be poorer than similar land that had not been as thor- 

 oughly cultivated. That ai>plies to lime. AVe use lime in 

 that sense to increase the amount of available plant food. 

 You knoAv that years ago they used to fallow their soil; in 

 Europe they still do so. INIany years ago they used to have 

 the regular three-fold system ; a man had thirty acres of 

 land, he had ten acres falloAved every year, just as the farm- 

 ers in the dry farming section of the United States and 

 Canada grow one crop in two years on some of the land be- 

 cause they have not enough water, the rain fall is too slight 

 for more than one crop in tAvo years or tAvo crops in three 

 years, but the farmers in Europe, after they have farmed 

 their land for many years and it has become poor, had to 

 fallow it, let the land rest. You find that idea expressed in 

 the Bible, the land was to receive a rest once in seven years, 

 ^nd there are a great many places in Europe where they 

 still have the notion that land must rest, and they crop for 

 several years until the production dAvindles down and then 

 they let weeds grow for several years and the land seems to 

 regain, in a way, some of its lost fertility. Unless you main- 

 tain the vegetable matter in the soil, the time will come 

 when that thoroughly tilled land will be poorer than simi- 

 lar land that has receiA^ed less cultiA'ation. 



MR. FRANKLIN: I am interested in straAvberries, and 

 T AA'ould like to ask a question of great importance to me ; 



