INTRODUCTION TO NEW EDITION. IX 



of May, many of our wheat-fields, especially on clay land, 

 looked as bare as a naked fallow. 



There was here and there, a good field of wheat. As a rule, it 

 was on naturally moist land,or after a good summer-fallow, sown 

 early, I know of but one exception. A neighboring nursery 

 firm had a very promising field of wheat, which was sown late. 

 But their land is rich and unusually well worked. It is, in fact, 

 in the very highest condition, and, though sown late, the young 

 plants were enabled to make a good strong growth in the 

 autumn. 



In such a dry season, the great point is, to get the seed to 

 germinate, and to furnish sufficient moisture and food to enable 

 the young plants to make a strong, vigorous growth of roots in 

 the autumn. I do not say that two hundred pounds of super- 

 phosphate per acre, drilled in with the seed, will always accom- 

 plish this object. But it is undoubtedly a great help. It does 

 not furnish the nitrogen which the wheat requires, but if it will 

 stimulate the production of roots in the early autumn, the 

 plants will bo much more likely to find a sufficient supply of 

 nitrogen in the soil than plants with fewer and smaller roots. 



In a season like the past, therefore, an application of two 

 hundred pounds of superphosphate per acre, costing three dol- 

 lars, instead of giving an increase of five or six bushels per 

 acre, may give us an increase of fifteen or twenty bushels per 

 acre. That is to say, owing to the dry weather in the autumn, 

 followed by severe weather in the winter, the weak plants on 

 the unmanured land may either be killed out altogether, or 

 injured to such an extent that the crop is hardly worth har- 

 vesting, while the wheat where the phosphate was sown may 

 give us almost an average crop. 



Sir John B. Lawes has somewhere compared the owner of 

 land to the owner of a coal mine. The owner cf the coal digs 

 it and gets it to market in the best way he can. The farmer's 

 coal mine consists of plant food, and the object of the farmer 

 is to get this food into such plants, or such parts of plants, as 

 his customers require. It is hardly worth while for the owner 

 of the coal mine to trouble his head about the exhaustion of 

 the supply of coal. His true plan is to dig it as economi- 

 cally as he can, and get it into market. There is a good deal 

 of coal in the world, and there is a good deal of plant food in 

 the earth. As long as the plant food lies dormant in the soil, 

 it is of no value to man. The object of the farmer is to con- 

 vert it into products which man and animals require. 



