PROCEEDINGS OF THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS* CONVENTION. 189 



will get a dust mulch to hold the water down that you can not get in a 

 soil devoid of humus. 



This humus, let me again say with all the force that I can, is the life 

 of the soil, and without it all life is gone and you can not live with the 

 soil that has lost its humus. Have you ever seen a man plowing a field 

 when it is wet? He says, "I have got to do this, because to-morrow I 

 have got another field to plow." What was he doing? Making adobe 

 bricks! He could make them quicker than any Mexican that ever 

 puddled them with his feet. He made his soil dead, and it will take 

 him years to restore the evil that he did in that one hour. The humus, 

 the bacteria, died in the hardened soil, because it could not get air, and 

 the soil became dead; and if you could take a crusher or if you could 

 take a miner's mill and pulverize all that soil, at a million dollars cost 

 on a great big acreage, you might reach it in a little shorter time than 

 otherwise you would, but it would take a long time to get it, neverthe- 

 less. Therefore, remember that you can not plow a soil when it is wet. 

 Remember that you must use the humus. Remember that you can get 

 that humus cheaply through the cover crop. It will cost you about $35 

 to put a cover crop on ten acres. The root system ramifies the whole 

 soil. 



I will read you in a minute the two experiments which I made by 

 analyzing these plants in the laboratory, to show you how much mineral 

 fertilizer was got out of ten acres of soil and how much nitrogen. The 

 cover crop is to get first the nitrogen. There are three million— am I 

 right ?— pounds of free nitrogen at your command from every acre of 

 your orchard field. By the growth of the cover crop the little bacteria 

 in the soil will go through the hair roots and you will soon see tubercles 

 growing. The little bacteria are taking in the nitrogen and giving a 

 portion of it to the plant in exchange for starch, and if you analyze that 

 you will find an enormous amount of nitrogen has been gotten from the 

 atmosphere for nothing. 



What do you pay for nitrogen? $60 for nitrate of soda, with only 

 16 to 18 per cent available in the ton. 320 pounds of available 

 nitrate for $60. But I can prove through the laboratory that I got 

 over 2,000 pounds of nitrogen from the atmosphere for the $35 that 

 I expended and put into the cover crop. In growing a cover crop 

 you are growing it to get the nitrogen, so that the mineral already in 

 the soil may be available. Therefore, do not feed your soil with nitrates 

 before the planting of the cover crop ; do not feed nitrates ; feed them 

 phosphates, feed them potashes, and they will grow better and gather 

 more nitrogen for your use. 



There are 40,000 pounds of potash and 7,000 or 8,000 pounds of phos- 

 phoric acid and about two per cent of phosphorus available to the acre 

 and about thirty-nine per cent of the phosphoric acid. Yet, nevertheless, 



