CHAPTER XII 

 STABLE MANURE 



Livestock Farming. -- The fertility of the soil 

 is most safely guarded in regions devoted to live- 

 stock farming. " Selling everything off the farm " 

 is a practice associated in the public mind with 

 soil poverty. It is a rule with few exceptions that 

 the absence of livestock on the farm is an index 

 of gradual reduction in the productive power of 

 the land. Generally speaking, the farmers who 

 feed the most of their crops on the farm are main- 

 taining fertility, and those who do not feed their 

 crops on the farm have been making drafts upon 

 the soil's stores of available plant-food that are 

 evidenced in a reduction of yields. These state- 

 ments will have the assent of all careful observers. 

 The inference has been that the maintenance of 

 fertility requires the return to the land of all the 

 manure that would result from feeding its crops 

 on the farm. We know that by such feeding we 



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