CHAPTER II 



THE MANURE HEAP 



The basis of any scheme of manuring must in general be 

 farmyard manure, and the success of the scheme will vary as this 

 is well or badly managed. Some 37 million tons of farmyard 

 manure, valued at 11,000,000, are said to be made in the United 

 Kingdom each year, thus it exceeds both in weight and in value 

 all other fertilisers put together. But unfortunately there is often 

 more waste of farmyard manure than of anything else on the 

 farm, and most valuers would reckon that half of its goodness 

 never reached the crop at all. Probably in no single direction 

 is so much improvement possible as here. 



Farmyard manure represents a mixture of litter with the 

 parts of its food that the animal neither keeps in its body nor 

 burns away into gas. It is, therefore, of the same nature as the 

 food itself, i.e. as the crop. Changes take place during the passage 

 through the animal's body ; something is taken away, but nothing 

 is added, and all that the animal can be said to do by way of 

 improving the material is to break it down very finely and to kill 

 the seeds. But even this is not done very well: horses, for 

 example, allow live seeds to pass through their intestines, as 

 shown by the crops of oats that sometimes spring up when horse 

 manure is applied to the land. 



The value of manure depends on three things: the food, the 

 animal, and the method of storage. 



As a general rule the richness of the manure depends on the 

 amount of albuminoids or proteins in the food, and not on the 

 amount of oil, because the albuminoids contain nitrogen, the most 

 important constituent of the manure. Nowadays the potash is 



