48 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [P. D. 4. 



phosphorus year by year. It is worth while remembering that 

 manures that have been exposed to the weather lose potash a 

 great deal, but lose relatively little of the phosphates they con- 

 tain. Still another important thing is that the fertilizers we 

 have been using for the last forty or fifty years have always, all 

 of them, been rich in phosphoric acid. The situation here — 

 Director Thorne fully recognized this — is different, and it 

 should be taken into account in considering and applying what 

 Director Thorne has said. 



A Member. Could I ask the professor one more question? 

 He mentioned in his lecture that millions of pounds of fertility 

 was being lost by the Ohio farms and going down into the river 

 valley; is your station making any effort to prevent that waste, 

 and if so, in what line is it working? 



Mr. Thorne. That matter I alluded to very briefly in our 

 treatment of the manure. We are trying to show the value of 

 manure if properly handled under our Ohio conditions, and we 

 are doing all we can to persuade farmers, by our teaching, that 

 manure is too valuable to allow it to waste in the barnyard. 

 That is as far as we can go. We are trying to show the farmer 

 how valuable the manure is and how it may be conserved. 



A Member. Have you told them to put in cement pits to 

 preserve this manure in? 



Mr. Thorne. Oh yes, we are doing that. We discourage the 

 separation of the solids from the liquid. We want them both 

 kept together on cemented floors in the stable or in properly 

 constructed manure receptacles outside. A pit is not absolutely 

 necessary, though it is a convenience; but we have shown that in 

 six months' feeding the loss from a lot of cattle fed under shel- 

 ter on a dirt floor, as compared to the loss of an equivalent lot 

 of cattle fed in the same stable with a cemented floor, may be 

 sufficient to pay half the cost of cementing the floor. We have 

 done that in a very elaborate series of experiments. 



Following Dr. Thome's address, Vice-President Bursley in- 

 troduced Mr. Nathan B. Flood of North Adams as presiding 

 officer, and Mr. Flood in turn introduced Mr. Henry K. Han- 

 nah of New York, who spoke on "Advertising Agricultural 

 Products." 



