10 N. H. AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION [Bulletin 199 



farmer is an actual one, not to be discounted by his lack of equip- 

 ment, and the experiment has given a solid footing to the home- 

 mixing work. 



ANALYSES PREVENT FRAUD 



Perhaps of even greater importance is the steady annual in- 

 spection service which has been going on at the Station for twenty- 

 two years since the passage of the Fertilizer Inspection Law, in 

 co-operation with the State Department of Agriculture. The 

 analyses made at the Station laboratory have made it possible 

 for the State Department to prevent the sale of materials in the 

 state for fertilizer purposes which are fraudulently misrepre- 

 sented or which have no value. The protection afforded the 

 farmers on the 17,000 tons of fertilizers which they use annually 

 has been a real insurance. It has frequently frustrated the at- 

 tempts of unscrupulous dealers to unload worthless materials at 

 $20-S30 a ton. 



These, then, are some of the ways in which the Experiment 

 Station has been working to cut the farmer's fertilizer bill, or, 

 perhaps one should say, to make his purchase and use of fertilizers 

 more intelligent and discriminating. 



Another question which hits the farmer's pocketbook in an 

 even more vital spot is : 



HOW CAN WE CUT OUR GRAIN BILL? 



There is nothing that eats into the New Hampshire farmer's 

 income so extensively as his purchase of commercial feedstuffs. 

 During the past j-ear he bought approximately 200,000 tons at a 

 cost of over $12,000,000. No big commercial company would 

 think of buying this quantity of materials without maintaining 

 a laboratory to check carefully the quality of its purchases; and 

 here again, as in connection with the fertilizer market, the Ex- 

 periment Station performs a protective service. For fifteen years 

 reports of analyses have been published, thus enabling the State 

 Department to prevent the sale of fraudulent feedstuffs and enab- 

 ling the farmer to determine which feeds give him the most for his 

 money. 



