188 PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION". 



men who are down at Berkeley, in Michigan and Dakota and Minnesota 

 and Iowa and throughout all the states are endeavoring to teach us 

 this principle of the handling of our soils, that if we keep them physi- 

 cally well by proper manipulation and put back the humus that we take 

 out, we will get greater returns from year to year. For every dollar 

 we expend in restoring the fertility of the soil we are repaid two. 



Go down South to the slave states. When they had the slaves it 

 was easier to go out and clear another hundred acres than it was to 

 restore the fertility of the one hundred acres which the cotton and the 

 tobacco and the corn had exhausted, and so they went on clearing acre 

 after acre and leaving behind them drifting sand. They are re-estab- 

 lishing that to-day by growing cover crops of cow peas. They are doing 

 the same in Illinois and all over the continent— re-establishing the con- 

 ditions that were in the soil when they were laid down by Nature, by the 

 growing of cover crops. Take a cover crop, then, and let us grow it. We 

 will take a cover crop or barnyard manure to restore the humus. Go 

 out and buy barnyard manure, buy what you can, but we find that we 

 can not get enough of it to restore the soil. And if you could get it, 

 we find that it costs from $300 to $700 for a ten-acre orchard to get 

 barnyard manure to the extent of ten cubic feet to the tree. Now, if 

 we all demanded that, and did not use the cover crop, we would not be 

 able to pay for it, even if we could get it. But we find that by grow- 

 ing the Canadian, the Russian blue, the cow pea of the South, and all 

 the other several varieties of cover crops, we not only get it at a 

 nominal cost, but we restore the aeration and ventilation of the soil and 

 give to the soil the organic acids that are necessary to make available 

 the mineral fertilizers that are there for our use. 



Take the cow pea or the red clover, they ramify the soil from every 

 direction. I have followed a cow pea three feet into the soil. Why do 

 you plow? That the air may get into the soil. Why do you plow in 

 the orchard? That you may break the soil. Did you ever have a plow 

 that went three feet into the soil? Did you ever have a plow that 

 would lay up humus three feet deep, or with which, if sufficient air gets 

 into it, will make humus? The cover crop will do it for you. The 

 stubborn soil that is now trying your very soul because you have not 

 sown the cover crop will be as friable as the onion bed which you used 

 to weed on your knees on holidays and blame your mother because you 

 could not be with the other boys playing baseball. Your cultivator will 

 move through it easily; your horses will not sweat as much; they will 

 grow fat on half the feed they would require when plowing and culti- 

 vating in a dead soil, that closes up as soon as you go over it ; but with 

 the humus brought about by the cover crop your soil will be so friable 

 and so free and so light that your cultivator will move easily and you 



