TAKING PAY FOR LABOR IN MANURE 
TRIBUTE TO AN OLD-TIME SUPERSTITION. 
The picture shown at Fig. 122 is a photograph of a 
New England barnyard of 15 or 20 years ago. As the 
reader will see, the lower part is bounded by a stone 
wall. Below that a steep side hill runs down to a 
little brook, the waters of which go to help swell the 
distant river which flows into the ocean. 
To me this picture brings back many an aching 
memory of life on a stony little farm not far from the 
ocean. The few poor old sheep, the thin runts of 
calves, the bony horned cattle and the spavined o’d 
horse ! There they are as though they had stepped 
out of a mental picture and taken on actual life, and 
the most natural thing of all is that manure pile that 
the calves are nosing over. About all the goodness 
there ever was in that pile has been washed out of it 
down to the brook where it could do nothing but 
make the neighbors sick. Yet that 
leached manure pile was always con¬ 
sidered about the best crop of the 
farm. There was very little cash in 
onr old farming—it was all manure. 
Somehow the boys never had any 
money to spend on little things for 
themselves. When I asked what profit 
there was in such farming anyway I 
got this answer—“ Why, don’t you see 
what a big pile of manure we have ? ” 
Of course I saw it, but somehow it 
didn’t make me very enthusiastic over 
farming to feel that I must taue pay 
for my services in leached manure. 
Often have I seen the old farmer figure 
up his profits at the end of the year 
and joyfully proclaim the fact that he 
was $50 ahead on the year’s business. 
Then his wife, with heart and lungs 
and back aching at the year’s work 
and disappointment, would say : 
“ Oh, yes ; but count your labor and 
mine at the same rate you’d pay hired 
folks and see where you come out. 
Why isn’t our work worth the going 
wages?” 
Then the old gentleman would scratch 
his head hard and long until light 
would strike him as follows : 
“Yes, yes ! There must be 75 loads 
of manure on the place. Let’s call it 
worth $3 a load. That brings it up 
right and pays us good wages.” 
And so these worthy folks worked 
hard and long for board, clothes, 
funeral expenses and manure. There 
was nothing in such farming to hold a 
boy or girl to the farm—no wonder they went away 
to the shoe shop or the town. I have come to believe 
that these leached manure piles did more to discredit 
New England farming than any other single thing. 
They put farming on a false basis because they forced 
a farmer to place too high a valuation on the fertility 
they should have contained in order to make both ends 
apparently meet. When you estimate that a load of 
manure represents $3 worth of your good labor and 
then let the rain wash out $2.50 worth of this value— 
the result must be disappointing. 
The reverence for leached stable manure that some 
folks have seems to be a part of an old superstition 
handed down from our forefathers. These worthy 
men believed that plants were fed by “one homo¬ 
geneous mass ” that was changed into what we call 
nitrogen, potash and phosphoric acid after it had 
entered the plant. For example, they said, “ Take the 
wheat plant; when it is young there is nothing in it 
but juice—yet that plant has the power to change 
that juice into hard grain and straw ! ” In the same 
way they held that an animal had power to give new 
value to hay and grain, so that the manure made from 
such foods was worth more than the originals would 
have been. 
Naturally such men came to have a reverence for 
stable manure that nothing could shake. A manure 
pile was almost a sacred thing with these farmers, and 
they could not understand that the liquids contained 
the most valuable portion, and that water would 
leach the manure pile just as it leached the wood 
ashes for soap. The barns were usually put so they 
would easily drain into the brook—that was the 
easiest way to get rid of the useless water ! It became 
almost an eleventh commandment with such farmers 
that no hay, straw, stalks or grain that could be fed to 
live stock, should ever be sold off the farm. So this 
went on for over 200 years. Every year several head 
of cattle walked away with a portion of the soluble 
phosphates and nitrogen from the soil, and every year 
the rain leached half the value of the manure into the 
brook. Sometimes the folks of a distant generation 
dug muck out of the swamp and put it on the higher 
fields, but in the main it was all outgo, the only return 
being in that old belief that the cattle were somehow 
adding to the value of the hay by chewing it. Nothing 
speaks so well for the quality of New England soil 
as the fact that to-day, after two centuries of such 
farming, these stony farms still support a sound and 
sturdy race of farmers, with more money, comforts 
and independence than their forefathers ever knew. 
Leached manure and such a barnyard scene as is 
here shown ? No, no ! The finger-post from a leached 
manure pile points directly to mortgage and debt. 
The modern farmer simply refuses to take pay for his 
work in manure. That his father did it when the 
farm was naturally stronger and live stock sold for a 
fair price to the local butcher is no reason why he 
should. But your ancestors all proved that good 
i manure is the best plant-food in the world. 
' <5? / were just exactly right, but they didn’t know 
why it was so. When the chemist picked the soil, the 
crop and the manure apart and showed us that nitro¬ 
gen, potash and phosphoric acid are the same no 
matter how and where we find them, stable manure 
became no less valuable, but it lost a good deal of the 
humbug about its supernatural power that has done 
so much to take the life out of New England soil. 
The same process that demonstrated the value of 
stable manure also demonstrated its weakness and the 
possibility of making a substitute for it. 
No man with any respect for himself will any longer 
accept a pile of leached manure in payment for his 
year’s labor. There are two ways of securing a more 
n gotiable substance. One is to keep no animal that 
will not give a clear profit in milk, butter meat or 
work without counting the manure worth a cent. 
The other is to keep no animals at all, buy fertilizers 
and sell everything that can be sold. 
An animal that must have its ability 
to make manure counted in order to 
pay day wages to its keeper will make 
more mortgage than manure. While 
it is possible to breed and feed animals 
that can make the farmer a clear pres¬ 
ent of their manure, what man has a 
right to make his family accept a man¬ 
ure pile in exchange for their hard 
labor and care ? That is just what 
lots of men are doing, and you know it! 
If an Eastern farmer will not breed 
and feed the best animals he can, the 
sooner they are taken with tuberculosis 
and slaughtered by the government 
agents the better off he will be. 
If a man should leave a bag of ferti¬ 
lizer out in the rain, he would vote him¬ 
self a simp eton—unless he put it broad¬ 
cast on ground to be used that same sea¬ 
son for a crop. A bag of fertilizer is 
simply a condensed manure pile, and 
why should they not have much the 
same treatment? To put a manure pile 
on the top of a hill with a good wash to 
the brook is as senseless a job as to 
light your pipe with a $10 bill. The 
only sensible way to leach manure is 
to haul it out as fast as made on to 
level grass land, and spread it there to 
be plowed in for corn. Unless used in 
that way the manure should be kept 
under cover as carefully as the ferti¬ 
lizer or packed in a close, compact heap 
where it cannot drain. When you hear 
a man telling that fertilizers are “no 
good” because they “leach out,” you 
can make up your mind that he either has a barnyard 
made on the principle of a flower-pot or keeps a 
boarding-house where the boarders do not stir up 
the sugar in their coffee, so it goes into the dish 
water. 
Farmers went away from New England after 
cheaper plant food. Two centuries of leached stable 
manure farming had made plant food too costly. If 
Liebig had made his great dis overy regarding super¬ 
phosphates, and the German potash mines had been 
discovered 100 years ago instead of 50 or 30, the farm 
history of this land would have been greatly changed. 
As the use of fertilizer becomes better understood 
fewer and fewer farmers “go West!” What saves 
Eastern farming ? A plain understanding of what 
stable manure really is. What does such knowledge 
lead to ? Improved stock and chemical fertilizers. Fer¬ 
tilizer farming simply gets rid of the scrub and teaches 
the farmer that animals kept to make manure only 
are the biggest frauds in all agriculture. h. w. c. 
A New England Barnyard Leach. Fig. 122. 
