396 Transactions of the American Institute. 



opportunity to suggest to the Department the difficulties and 

 detects in farm practices, in order that the essays published annually 

 or the monthly reports and farm knowledge that come within our 

 knowledge, may to some extent reach and remove these evils. 



" 1. Farmers east of the Alleghany range, in Eastern New York, 

 New Jersey and the New England States, have been for many 

 years less successful in growing fruit, and especially apples, than 

 formerly. Whether this is owing to changes in climate, to exhaua 

 tion of soil, or bad culture, or to all these causes combined, we are 

 unable to say. So general has been this failure, that the seaboard 

 cities of the North now depend for their apples almost entirely 

 upon Western New York and the States bordering on the great lakes. 



"2. The farmers of this region are by no means properly 

 impressed with the importance of saving all substances that have 

 value as manure. A great improvement has taken place in this 

 respect, but liquid excrements are not absorbed and returned to 

 the soil as they should be; bones are thrown away like brickbats, 

 while at the same time high prices are paid for commercial fer- 

 tilizers, often deceptive in their composition and unprofitably 

 applied. The Club does not know of any one subject upon which 

 it is so important to arouse the minds of the rural population as 

 upon the value of different fertilizers, and the supreme necessity for 

 restoring in some manurial substance as much potash, lime and 

 phosphorus as the crops remove. We regard this branch of 

 economy as fundamental to all sound husbandry, and cannot but 

 hope that the Commissioner, in his wisdom, may devise some way 

 of illuminating the ignorance and removing the indifference of our 

 farmers on this vita,l point of agriculture. 



" 3. We observe with some alarm the decrease in the productive- 

 ness of our wheat fields; especially those of the Northwestern States. 

 While such large exportations of the cereals are aiinually made, and 

 the surfaces from which the crops are taken are scantily manured, 

 the result must be an exhaustion of the more rare and valuable 

 constituents of a fertile soil, and the removal of those substances 

 to the great centers of European life and industry. 



*' We therefore trust the Department will earnestly recommend to 

 our agricultural communities to export butter, cheese, wool and 

 products which remove but moderate portions of phosphorus and 

 ammonia from the soil, and not take away the fatness of our lands 

 by such enormous exportations of grain. 



*' We have no doubt that these rules have been observed by the 



