180 PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 



THE VALUE OF COVER CROPS IN PRESERVING THE LIFE OF 



THE SOIL. 



By JAMES MILLS, of Riverside. 



I hope that you will give me a sympathetic hearing. I have a large 

 subject. I do not feel capable of dealing with it in the manner in 

 which it ought to be dealt with. It is a subject all of you ought to be 

 studying. You could give days, weeks, months, years to it and not 

 exhaust it. It is a subject which we must know more about if we are 

 going to do our duty by ourselves, our fellows and posterity. It is 

 a subject that will enable us, if we thoroughly understand it, to keep 

 our soils in a real state of fertility, in first-class physical condition, in 

 condition to do work for us more and more from year to year, and to be 

 left in condition after we are done with it to do more work for those who 

 succeed us than it did for us when we received it. 



I am not very well to-night ; yet I am not sick. If my voice gives out 

 on me it is because I have got a cold. My subject is not a written one ; 

 I am going to speak, and whenever I feel that you are uneasy I can 

 break it off short, and I will. 



The Romans, two thousand years ago, used the cover crop to keep 

 their soil fertile. They did not know just what effect it had on the soil, 

 or, rather, they did not know just what brought that effect about which 

 was apparent to them. They knew that after the growth of a cover 

 crop, a crop of legumes, other crops succeeding them were better than 

 where they were not used. 



The Egyptians, for thousands of years, also have used these cover 

 crops. The berseem has been used throughout centuries. No doubt 

 Joseph, when he was premier of Egypt, saw the berseem used year after 

 year and followed with the corn and the cotton and the sugar-cane; 

 and those soils have been kept in very good physical condition, a 

 splendid condition of fertility, by the use of these leguminous crops as 

 well as by the overflow of the great Nile River. 



The ordinary layman is not aware that the growth of our crops and 

 the existence of agriculture and horticulture, and, therefore, the exist- 

 ence of life, animal life, on the planet, are dependent upon life in the 

 soil, the existence there of micro-organisms, bacteria— bacteria which, 

 in size, reach from l-2,'500 to 1-25,000 of an inch, and that from 

 30,000 to 1,500,000 of these are found in a gramme of agricultural soil— 

 15.4 grains of soil. In places, in densely populated cities, where cleanli- 

 ness is not observed, as in some . of the Italian cities, we will find in 

 the same extent, the same bit of soil, the gramme, from thirty millions to 

 one billion of these micro-organisms. 



Bacteria affect all conditions of life. They multiply enormously. 



