332 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[September, 
This will enable us to keep up a moderate heat 
with the least expenditure of labor, and with 
the total exclusion of the smoke and gas of tbe 
fire. The cost of construction 'will not exceed 
the value of two weeks' product, and the ex- 
pense for fuel will not exceed two cents per 
pound on the amount of butter made. I am 
confident that my customers will cheerfully pay 
ten cents per pound extra for the certainty of 
ahrays having their butter of first quality, while 
the new customers that the increased capacity 
of the dairy will require will be much more 
readily secured. 
A neighbor, who also keeps Jersey cattle, re- 
cently bewailed his inability to get my prices, 
and ascribed his failure to the fact that he could 
not advertise his butter and " write it up" as I do. 
The reply to this was that my butter is never ad- 
vertised at all, and that it is only "written up" 
in these Ogden Farm Papers, which, so far as I 
know and believe, are never seen by a single 
one of those who buy the butter. "Good wine 
needs no bush," and good butter is equally suc- 
cessful in making its own way. The reason 
why " O. F." butter sells for a better price than 
common butter is that it is better — made from 
the milk of better cows, by a better system, and 
(to give Frau Haubrich her well-earned share 
of the credit) by a better butter-maker. Any 
other farmer who will use the same means 
that we do will achieve a corresponding suc- 
cess; until so many of them do it as to make 
the supply of good butter equal to the demand 
for it — and that will not be in our day. 
In an article in this number ou Earth-Closet 
Manure I have alluded to the question of 
fallows — the "pet idea" of my friend who 
" Walks and Talks on the Farm." I shall not 
have the temerity to oppose any recommenda- 
tion of so good a farmer as he is, especially 
when he h sustained by the recorded experience 
of many generations of good farmers who have 
preceded him, notably by Jethro Tull, who be- 
lieved that the frequent and thorough stirring 
of the soil might be made to do away with the 
necessity for manure. At the same time, Dr. 
Voelcker's statement concerning the small 
amount of ammonia found in earth which had 
passed five times through the closet, confirms a 
suspicion that I have long bad, and for which I 
have found some authority in my reading, that 
loose, dry earth (loose enough and dry enough 
to admit air freely into its pores) is a destroyer 
of the ammoniacal products of the decomposi- 
tion of organic matter. Or, to be more precise, 
the air is the destroyer, and the earth condenses 
or concentrates the air, and makes it more 
rapidly active. 
Investigations made in England with a view 
to determining the value of sewage-water as 
manure, and others to decide on its contaminat- 
ing influence when mixed with the water of 
rivers, have shown that under tbe condition of 
exposure to tbe air to which the movement of 
the water subjects it, its organic impurities are 
after a certain distance traveled entirely anni- 
hilated. Not only are the original compounds 
of the sewage destroyed, but the resultant im- 
purities of their decomposition, and even the 
ammonia, etc., into which these are finally re- 
solved, are utterly consumed (or withdrawn) by 
the air after a certain amount of exposure, so 
1hat the water becomes safe to drink, and use- 
less as manure. This effect is ascribed to the 
action of the oxygen of the air, which con- 
sumes, under favorable circumstances, all or- 
ganic matters. 
The ability of animal charcoal to disinfect large 
volumes of foul gases is in like manner ascribed 
to the fact (or to the supposition) that it con- 
denses within its pores much oxygen (or active 
ozone), which there exists under circumstances 
favorable to its powerful and repeated action — 
destroying and dissipating (not storing up) the 
products of organic decomposition with which 
it comes in contact. It seems to act like a mill, 
grinding all the foul grist it can receive, and 
ever ready for more. 
In like manner, but in less degree, the earth 
used in an earth-closet does not store up all the 
ammonia that the decomposition of urine and 
solid fasces supplies to it, but aids in its destruc- 
tion and dissipation. Dr. Voelcker seems to 
have demonstrated the fact that a mass of dry 
earth, in the loosened condition in which it is 
used in the closet, is a poor storehouse for the 
ammoniacal parts of manure. 
If this is true, then the same property of 
earth should exist in the soil of a cultivated 
field. Lying in a compact bed, it may retain 
animal manure indefinitely. Plowed and cov- 
ered with a crop, it may be able to carry the 
decomposition of effete organic matter only to 
the point of preparing it for use before it is 
taken up by the roots of the crop. But in the 
naked fallow, which is opened to tbe admission 
of air to the fullest possible extent, I see no 
reason why the destructive conditions of the 
earth-closet manure should not be present in 
the most active degree. I have heard farmers 
say, "That land has been plowed to death; 
the manure has all been burned out of it," and 
I think the above possible explanation of tbe 
destructive action of disinfectants accounts in a 
way for the injury to which they, refer. 
There is no doubt that the naked fallow sys- 
tem — the fine comminution of the soil — is very 
beneficial in developing the latent mineral 
sources of fertility. That it does not lead to 
the dissipation of its organic sources of fertility 
we can hardly believe. This is not to be taken 
as a conclusive argument against fallows, only 
as a suggestion about them. They offer an ex- 
cellent means for destroying weeds, and if these 
are allowed to grow nearly to maturity (flower- 
ing) before being plowed under, they secure a 
large and valuable addition of organic matter 
(green manuring). 
If the suggestion made constitutes a real ob- 
jection, it is one which will have more weight 
with those who adhere more strongly to the 
modern English idea of the supremacy of nitro- 
gen in manure, than to the "mineral theory" of 
Liebig, which is still not without its defenders. 
My knowledge of the subject is not sufficient to 
give especial weight to my opinion that the fun- 
damental and permanent fertility of the soil de- 
pends mainly on its mineral wealth, and but 
slightly on its content of nitrogen, and that, 
therefore, we shall be better off in the long run 
if we develop the mineral element even to the 
sacrifice of the ammonia. At the same time, I 
would hold very tenaciously to the crude organic 
matter on which the fertile physical condition 
of the soil (and the chemical condition too) so 
largely depends, and my fallows should always 
be " green fallows." Rag-weed or some other 
rapid grower should carry into the furrow a 
good supply of organic- matter at each plowing. 
My relations with the Island of Jersey have 
brought me acquainted with a work on "The 
Varieties, Properties, and Classification of 
Wheat," written by Col. Le Couteur, who has 
long been known as a leading authority on Jer- 
sey cattle. This work on wheat contains the 
results of thirty-five years of careful experi- 
ment and study in connection with the growth 
of wheat on a large scale and in experimental 
beds — results which can not fail to be of the 
greatest value to all practical cultivators of the 
great cereal. I call attention to it in this way 
because it is not a work that is likely to be re- 
produced for the American market, and many 
of the readers of the Agriculturist ma}' bo in- 
terested to know of it. It has determined me 
to attempt the cultivation of some suitable vari- 
ety of wheat at Ogden Farm, although it is 
accepted by my neighbors as a fixed law that 
on the Island of Rhode Island, with its open 
winters and high winds, it is impossible to grow 
it at all. Col. Le Couteur's work encourages 
me to think that I may find a variety that, on 
our excellent wheat soil, will withstand our un- 
favorable climate. Whether its cultivation will 
pay, even if it is successful, is yet to be proven, 
but the chances are worth the trial. 
~— — ••— .-. 
"Water Running into an TJnderdrain. 
A subscriber to the American Agriculturist 
in Ulster Co., N. Y., writes: "I have a large 
ditch into which empty two or three springs, 
which form quite a large stream at some seasons 
of the year. It starts from a farm above me, and 
flows through 20 rods of my land. I want to 
cover it up. How shall I manage to run it no 
further up than my line, and yet not have it 
fill in at the head ? I also want to have my 
branch underdrains to flow into it." 
There is no difficulty in regard to the side 
underdrains discharging into the main covered 
drain, provided the main drain has sufficient 
capacity to cany off all the water. The real 
difficully in the case is the water flowing from 
the open ditch into the covered drain. It is apt 
to carry sticks, weeds, grass, etc., into the drain, 
and stop it up. We have on our own farm a 
covered drain, four to five feet deep, and over 
one hundred rods long, laid with five-inch tiles 
at the upper end, and towards the lower end 
we have two five-inch tiles to cany off the in- 
creased volume of water that is discharged from 
the lateral drains. At the upper end there is 
more or less water coming from a ditch on the 
side of the highway which flows into this main 
underdrain, and the plan we adopted was this : 
For about eight or ten feet from the open ditch 
at the upper end of the underdrain, we cut the 
underdrain three or four feet wider and deeper 
than the other portion of the underdrain, and 
filled it in with stones up to the surface. These 
stones act as a kind of filter. The object of 
making it deeper than the tiles is to allow any 
sediment that may be in the water flowing from 
the open drain to settle. If our correspondent 
will adopt this plan, and do the work thoroughly 
we apprehend he will experience no trouble 
from his underdrain filling up. On Mr. John 
Johnston's farm, which consists of high rolling 
land, and on which he lias laid over fifty miles 
of underdrains, there are several places where 
a considerable body of surface water at certain 
seasons of the year flows into the underdrains 
from the highway, and the plan he adopted is 
substantially the same as the one described 
above. The drains have been laid for over 
twenty years, and none of them have ever 
stopped up, except oue where the roots of an 
elm-tree grew into and choked up one of the 
tiles. There has been no trouble with the sur- 
face water flowing into the tiles from the road. 
The stone-filters exclude leaves and other mat- 
ter suspended in the surface water. 
