190 PROCEEDINGS OP THIRTY-THIRD FRUIT-GROWERS ' CONVENTION. 



you have no right to exhaust that store. It is to do for all time, and 

 more of that inert material will become available by your using some- 

 what of the commercial fertilizer that will cost you from $20 to $35 per 

 ton. You will get more nitrogen. Your crop, because of the prodi- 

 gality of your soil, will be better, your bank account will be greater, 

 your wife's smiles will be brighter, your children will be clothed better, 

 the conditions surrounding your home will be immensely improved, you 

 can send your children to the best schools in the land and give them the 

 opportunities that others get, if you will rightly operate the soil that 

 you have got in your power to operate. Yes, I say that you can become 

 rich on ten acres of soil in California. I say you can? I have seen it 

 done. I have seen a man in fifteen years become worth $75,000 with a 

 start of just $400 after the payment for his land, planting his orchard, 

 growing it, buying others with the profit and being worth to-day $75,000 

 and off his orchard getting $15,000 net income this year. But he was 

 an ideal farmer. He did everything that the soil required, and he 

 became rich. 



Let me just now, in closing, tell you about these analyses. I had eight 

 varieties of cover crops a couple of years ago, to endeavor to find out 

 which was the better. I found that I got from one of these varieties 

 68,350 pounds of green material to the acre for the vines and 12,705 

 pounds for the root system; and from another, 68,000 for the vine and 

 about the same for the root, and all running the same, from about 

 60,000 to 68,000 and 70,000 pounds. Now, out of some of these varie- 

 ties I got 101 pounds of available phosphoric acid to the acre — measura- 

 bly available, more fully available than in its inert state in the mineral 

 matter of the soil ; and of potash, 317 pounds, which after the decaying 

 of the cover crop when it was plowed under, would become more readily 

 available than- before; and of nitrogen, 276 pounds. And so with 

 another: phosphoric acid, 91 pounds; potash, 241 pounds; nitrogen, 284 

 pounds. Of the Vicia sativa, 131 pounds of phosphoric acid ; 364 pounds 

 of potash, and 244 pounds of nitrogen to the acre. That is, 1,300 pounds 

 of phosphoric acid for ten acres, which are our units, as it were, and 

 3,640 pounds of potash, and 2,440 pounds of nitrogen. Now, these are 

 demonstrations of our own. Our chemist may not have been perfect, 

 but I have compared them with works of Snyder and King and Hilgard 

 and others, and I don't think we are very far off — in fact, I know we 

 are not very far off, if at all. 



Now, let us look at that. I said that we got the amounts that 1 have 

 stated. Compare them for a moment. You buy, say, ten pounds of 

 complete fertilizer for every tree in your orchard. There are a hun- 

 dred trees to the acre, a thousand trees to the ten acres. Ten pounds 

 to the tree would be five tons of commercial fertilizer. Five tons 

 would be $40 a ton. That fertilizer would contain 4 per cent of 



