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



hi the soil that will best develop them and make them healthy organisms 

 to grow crops for you, for without them you can not grow any crops. 



The soil with which we have to deal, where does it come from? You 

 gc up into the mountains — possibly you have gone up into the Yosemite 

 and traveled from the old Tioga road to Tuolumne Meadows ; possibly 

 you have climbed to the top of Lisle ; possibly you have gone down the 

 great canon of the Tuolumne River to Hetch Hetchy Canon, and every- 

 where you saw death. Everywhere you saw decomposition taking place. 

 Everywhere you saw the tree that has grown for two hundred — for a 

 thousand years — the great sequoias in those forests of the sequoia. You 

 see some of the giants down and decomposition taking place, bacterial 

 action taking place there to prepare them again for the growth of 

 plants in the soil. Death ! Decomposition ! The tree, the vegetable mat- 

 ter and the animal matter that would there have life are decomposing. 

 The detritus from the mountainside is being decomposed, disintegrating 

 by weathering, disintegrating by cold, by water, by ice, and these 

 together, the decaying vegetable matter and the animal matter, with 

 the detritus, are carried in the floods of springtime from the mountains 

 out into the valleys and there laid down. These mountains which we 

 have traveled through were once upon a time a mile higher, piercing the 

 clouds even a mile higher than now they do pierce those clouds, and 

 they have been weathered off and carried down, and now in southern 

 California and in central California and here in these beautiful, fertile 

 valleys, we are growing our crops on the earth, on the rock that once 

 was on top of the mountains, and in the valleys, and in the decayed 

 vegetable matter that is incorporated in them. . 



Then, soil is but the detritus from the mountainside and vegetable 

 matter and animal matter in process of decay, called humus — earth 

 and humus. When we deal with this soil, cultivate and irrigate and 

 grow our crops of corn and wheat, and oats and barley, and lemons and 

 oranges, and all the deciduous crops, we are taking from the soil this 

 humus, which is the life of the soil. The more we cultivate with our 

 cultivators — here in California we do not allow the grass to grow in our 

 orchards; we keep plowing them. Intense cultivation is our method, 

 and the finer we cultivate it the quicker is torn out the life of the soil. 

 Now. when the humus is exhausted from the soil we have again the 

 very detritus that came from the mountainside. It is not soil; it is 

 but detritus ; it is but rock ; it is but mineral matter ; without the humus 

 that gave it its life, which in its decomposition gave off organic acids 

 and acted as a storehouse of oxygen, leaves you a sterile soil. Now. if 

 that be the case, and it is the case, then the part of wisdom for us is 

 to keep up the supply of humus in the soil because of the beneficial 

 effect that it has on that soil ; for without humus we have no soil, with- 



