30 POTATO CULTUKE. 



them. It doesn't follow, however, that the great mass of 

 farmers in Ohio, say, can afford to use them at the prices 

 they get. 



Since writing the above, Bradley 's fertilizer book has 

 come to me. There is a beautiful picture of Chas. Hummers 

 potato -field, with baskets of fine tubers standing as dug 350 

 bushels of large smooth potatoes per acre, from 1400 pounds 

 of fertilizer per acre! and Chas. Dibble's wheat 37 bushels 

 per acre, and an average in the county of only 18! and friend 

 Collingwood, of the Rural New-Yorker, saying : u There are 

 many thousands of farmers in New York State who use a 

 ton of fertilizer per acre, plain business men, who ten years 

 ago were buying large quantities of stable manure, and to-day 

 you could not get them to pay 50 cents a cord for such 

 manure and haul it home !" How this excites me, with all 

 my adverse experience! I can hardly keep from ordering a 

 carload at once! But, alas! I am one of the " many thou- 

 sands" who can not show such results. If this book could 

 be delayed till fall, I would put 1400 pounds on an acre again 

 this year, and try it once more, paying the regular price for 

 it, so my report might be from a disinterested standpoint. 



My farmer friends, be perfectly sure you are right in this 

 matter, and then go ahead. My old friend J. M. Smith, 

 whose opinion Uncle Sam has not gold enough to buy, said 

 at a late institute : " Fertilizers have never paid me on good 

 or poor land." Prof. Thoin, Director of our Experiment 

 Station, after a great amount of study, in his bulletin, 

 " Forty Years of Wheat Culture in Ohio," says: "These 

 statistics indicate that the wheat crops of Ohio have been 

 slightly increased by the use of commercial fertilizers ; but 

 it appears that the average cost of this increase has equaled 

 its market value." 



