146 ALFALFA FARMING IN AMERICA. 
for railway ballast or for concrete construction? 
And here is another machine, more interesting yet, 
a machine of prophecy, a machine meaning great 
things to the farmer, for in this machine, so small 
and apparently insignificant, the rock is ground 
rapidly into powder and this powder through end- 
less carriers is loaded into cars, no man’s hands 
touching it after it is first dumped, and from this 
mill it goes forth by cars to the fields of Ohio. Think 
what this means; somewhere an old sour clay field 
refusing to grow clover, refusing to grow anything 
rich enough to yield profit, sending no boys to col- 
lege, giving little hope to the owner, and now under 
one shower of this ground limestone will come the 
miracle. The sourness will disappear, clover will 
grow, the bees will hum, the mower will click, the 
boy will whistle, books will come into the home and 
magazines, and let us hope some lad from that farm 
will start to the university. 
Building Soils to Stay Built—My father was a 
firm believer in the idea that a soil could be so en- 
riched that it would afterward stay rich, that it 
would gain momentum enough, so to speak, so: it 
would keep on caring for itself afterward. There- 
fore he would apply manure in large amounts to 
one spot of land after another, seeking to establish 
this condition of things. 
There is much basic truth in his theory and his 
practice was not far wrong. When much manure is 
worked into sweet soil, a soil well stored with car- 
bonate of lime, there is set up there a laboratory 
