1891.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 157 



element of plant food in a particular field that he can make 

 no money out of it. The roots in an acre of good clover 

 analyze with us about eighteen dollars' worth of nitrogen, 

 potash and phosphoric acid, or more than enough plant food 

 to raise twenty-five bushels of wheat to the acre. 



There is a big question here in regard to furnishing fertili- 

 zers to the soil most economically, and getting the nitrogen, 

 potash and phosphoric acid out of the soil. They are no 

 good in the soil unless somehow you can coax them out and 

 start them through a plant, then through an animal, and as 

 they go round the circle reach in and take out the little 

 fraction which you want to live on. And there are some 

 very strange things connected with the question what we 

 shall raise to sell. Now, if I raise wheat and sell it at 

 eighty cents a bushel, when I get two hundred dollars in my 

 pocket I have sold sixty-seven dollars' worth of my farm at 

 eighty cents a bushel. If I ride a twelve hundred pound 

 horse into Boston, a half-blood Percheron draft-horse, I will 

 say, and get two hundred dollars for that horse, I have sojd 

 seven dollars worth of my farm. If I take into Boston two 

 hundred dollars worth of butter, at twenty-five cents a 

 pound, I have sold about sixteen cents worth of my farm. 

 I can buy it at the drug store, put it in my vest pocket 

 and carry it home. So that in what wc shall take toll from 

 the soil becomes a great question in agriculture. 



Mr. Eaton. Where farmers use liberally of stable 

 manure, is there any necessity for their purchasing commer- 

 cial fertilizers other than phosphoric acid and potash? 



Professor Roberts. I do not think there is, if first-class 

 culture goes with it. It must be first class. I go back 

 again to Nature's method. For ages she ground "and pul- 

 verized, by water, by frost, by every known force which 

 Almighty God could bring to bear, to make the soil fine, 

 and where she did not get it fine she did not get soil, 

 she got rocks. Let us go and do likewise, use a little more 

 skill, and see if we cannot get the soil a little finer; then 

 sow our plants and feed them liberally, and after the plants 

 are grown feed them to the animal ; and then the animal, 

 which has only utilized a little fraction to supply its wants, 

 will give the balance back to man for his use, if he will not 



