SOURCES OF FERTILIZING MATERIALS 59 



farm to the factories and workshops, and the men who should be the means 

 of building up the waste places are abandoning the farms to desolation and 

 the negro. If this book is instrumental in any way in inducing some of these 

 farmers to adopt a different method, it will be well worth all the labor that 

 has been expended upon it. 



NO NEED FOR BUYING NITROGEN. 



While the saving and using of all the nitrogenous manures made on the 

 farm is an important part of the farm economy, the farmer who farms intelli- 

 gently and practices a proper rotation of crops, need never buy an ounce of 

 nitrogen in any shape for the ordinary farm crops. In the case of the market 

 gardener, on limited areas, and with crops of greater value, it is, of course, 

 important to heavily fertilize his acres. But in grain and grass farming, 

 the farmer who realizes what the legumes will do for him need never expend 

 a penny for nitrogen, and in fact, can not only get all he needs without cost, 

 but can make a profit in the getting of it. And here is the main use that the 

 farmer has for the commercial fertilizers, to enable him better to practice the 

 true method of acquiring the nitrogen that is so plentiful in the air, over 

 every acre, in all localities. No part of the country has a monopoly of the 

 aerial nitrogen. The air is just as rich over the poorest acre in the land as 

 over the most fertile, and the farmer on the poor farm can get it just as 

 readily as the man whose acres are already supplied with it. While nitrogen 

 is an essential thing to plant life, and crops cannot be grown without it, it is 

 the only element of plant-food that we can get without buying, and the one 

 that costs the most when we do buy it in fertilizer. Then, when we can, by 

 a proper course of culture, get this costly article which is so much needed, 

 and can put money in our pockets while getting it, is it not passing strange 

 that farmers should spend money for it? 



LEGUMINOUS PLANTS THE TRUE SOURCE OF NITROGEN FOR THE FARMER 



For many years farmers knew that in some mysterious way clover and other 

 plants of the pea family, did not only furnish forage for feeding animals, 

 but that the land was better for having grown the crop. Only within the 

 past few years, have scientists studied closely the way in which these plants 

 help the soil, and even yet very little is accurately known of the exact way in 

 which the work is done. For our present purpose, however, it is enough to 

 know that all the legumes have the power, by means of little microscopic 

 plants, which inhabit certain swellings or nodules on their roots, to get the 



