MAKING PLANS THAT WORK 63 



from soil analysis, but that is a tricky business: it 

 is not wise to bank too heavily on what it tells you. 

 And I knew, too, that it is not easy to get a proper 

 plant food balance when bought manure is used; 

 as well as that it takes more than one year to ren- 

 der a large part of the food in any manure "avail- 

 able" to growing vegetation. 



Lest the reader supposes that here, and else- 

 where throughout this book, I belabor the matter 

 of manure too heavily, let us stop right now and 

 consider a statistic on it. Dr. Van Slyke 1 reckons 

 the average loss from improper storage and treat- 

 ment of manure is at least two-thirds its value or 

 1 1.2 5 per ton at 1912 prices, the year he made that 

 estimate. There is nothing to indicate manure is 

 any better cared for today than it was twenty-five 

 years ago. If we take his figure of the manure pro- 

 duction per thousand pounds of live weight, and 

 multiply it by the 1927 census of dairy animals, we 

 find the average annual loss to this one branch of 

 husbandry alone is about four and one-half bil- 

 lion dollars. Again figuring at Dr. Van Slyke's 1912 

 prices, the value of the manure of my dairy cows 

 was just short of one hundred dollars in 1937. 



Since I should have to buy stockfeed well into 

 1933, and at most could not expect to grow all 

 my feed that first year, it occurred to me to keep 



i Lucius L. Van Slyke, Fertilizers and Crops, New York, 

 Orange Judd Co., 1920. 



