HAPPY HOLLOW FARM 165 



handling your soil, with deep plowing and good 

 cultivation, have made available each year a 

 new supply of nitrogen and potash and phos- 

 phorus, so that you've been able to take off 

 fifty bushels of corn to the acre right along. 

 You may do it for a few years more. But you 

 can't keep it up indefinitely, not on the richest 

 soil outdoors. Take away fifty bushels of corn 

 from an acre of land every year, with nothing 

 put back to take the place of that fertility, and 

 the time's coming when, no matter how good a 

 farmer you are nor how good your land was to 

 start with, you can't do it any longer. There's 

 the whole story of the "worn out farms" that 

 everybody's talking about. 



Liming a failing soil may put off the evil 

 day. But lime doesn't give you new nitrogen 

 and potash and phosphorus ; it merely helps in 

 "breaking down" some of the combinations al- 

 ready in the soil. The day will come when lim- 

 ing won't help any more. Crop rotation, too, 

 may postpone the reckoning, particularly if 

 you're using the nitrogen storers in your ro- 

 tation; but what about the potash and the 

 phosphorus? The long and short of it is that, 

 no matter what your rotation, if you're grow- 

 ing crops and selling them all away from your 



