154 Our Farming. 



periment. These experiments have been full and careful and 

 carried on in quite a large way for several years. They have 

 never done me one particle of good. I have used a complete 

 fertilizer containing all the ingredients needed for plant growth in 

 proper proportion, as we are told, and -at the rate of as high as 

 TOGO pounds per acre without any result. I might just as well 

 dump a carload of fertilizer in the fence corner as put it on my field. 

 And I have met plenty of others who have had the same experience. 

 This is no doubt largely due to the fact that my clover sod on 

 which I plant has fertility enough in it, and any more is simply 

 excess. Pretty good for clover, isn't it ? I asked Prof. Thorne, 

 of our Experiment Station, what he thought of this idea the other 

 day, and he said: " For three years past neither corn nor wheat 

 when put on clover sod has shown us any benefit from fertilizers. 

 If we continue same field in corn or wheat, fertilizers show after- 

 wards more and more as effect of clover passes away." But I 

 do not ever continue them in same crop, but put in clover again 

 and get more fertility, and hence fertilizers never get a chance to 

 show. 



Fertilizer men are often claiming, or saying positively, that 

 their fertilizer is not a stimulant, but a plant food just as much as 

 stable manure. This cannot be practically true. Analysis may 

 show the same ingredients, but they do not show same results. 

 Analysis shows my muck to be worth about the same as manure, 

 but practically it is not. I have no land on my farm so rich that 

 a load of my manure will not show every time where it is put, 

 even when spread quite thinly. It will show on any crop grown. 

 If it fails from drouth on first crop put out, it is there on the 

 next. If fertilizers are just as truly plant food, why do not they 

 show just the same? I have put two handfuls of complete 

 manure around a strawberry plant, part at a time and worked it 

 in, and manure around another, and the former had no effect what- 

 ever, and the latter did. As it might be lack of water, I watered 

 thoroughly several times, both alike, and the other plants they 

 were compared with, and the experiment was duplicated. I have 

 asked many wise men, chemists and professors, to explain this. 

 Prof. Lord, our State chemist at the time, said it might be owing 

 to the lack of vegetable matter where the fertilizers were used. 

 I tried them on soil where a heavy crop of clover was plowed 

 under with the same result. Knowing these facts, it is useless 

 for any one to tell me that fertilizers are just as much plant food 

 as manure. They do seem to be on some soils, but they are not 

 always so. They do pay beyond all question on some soils and 

 under some circumstances. On many they do not. The farmer 

 who takes for granted that they are as safe and actual food as 

 stable manure, under all circumstances, may get badly sold. 

 Perhaps you may think I got poor samples to test. Fearing this 

 might be the case I sent to the manufacturers direct for special 



