156 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan. 



Mr. Bowker. Some of it evaporates. 



Professor Roberts. Yes, some of it evaporates. That is 

 right. I tested a small barnyard fixed on purpose, and 

 found that every ton of water that leached out carried with 

 it sixty cents worth of plant food. Now, one purpose in 

 spreading manure in the fall is to form a blanket or covering 

 for the plant. That is nature's method. Another thing is 

 that to-day, on the average farm, except in special cases, 

 there should not be an acre nor a rod of land without a plant 

 growing on it. That may be new to you. Every inch of 

 open land is sowed to rye on our farm, no matter what we 

 want it for, and the next spring it is ploughed under or it 

 is grassed over. Wherever nature cannot grow plants, she 

 cannot make a soil ; that is wilderness. Before my corn is 

 cut, there is a man with ahorse sowing rye in the corn field, 

 a bushel or two bushels to the acre, just according to the 

 size of the pocket-book ; but two bushels are better than 

 one, because we get more plants. 



* Now, the next thing that has been found by recent experi- 

 ments, and it seems to be established beyond a doubt, — I 

 think we cannot gainsay it any longer, — is that microbes, 

 low forms of life, are in the soil, and have their homes in 

 dead and living vegetable matter ; that they multiply with 

 very great rapidity, and are able to absorb the nitrogen of 

 the air and combine it with the nitrogen of the soil. You 

 know that four-fifths of the air is nitrogen, and by properly 

 cultivating these microbes, if you please, by stirring the soil 

 frequently, what we term nitrification will go on ; which 

 simply means that we are cultivating microbes, making them 

 grow. We can increase, from ten to twenty per cent, the 

 nitrogen in the soil, without putting any nitrogen upon it. 



Now, my experience is this, — that the more farm manure 

 I save the better, and the more farm manure I have the 

 more commercial fertilizers I want ; but commercial fertil- 

 izers should not be used in connection with farm manure on 

 the general farm, but concentrated on gardening, where I 

 believe we shall come to use almost exclusively commercial 

 manures. My notion is, that the wheat farmer, the grass 

 farmer or the dairyman, will only use a commercial fertil- 

 izer when he sees that there is such a lack of a certain 



