Maintain the Fertility oe Our Soils. 
9 
and quality of crop, whether it is produced during the season of its 
application or later. 
The writer does not know of any series of experiments show¬ 
ing conclusively that the Colorado farmer can make a profit by 
using this salt on general crops, and will certainly be pardoned, if 
he does not find some sympathy, in entertaining a serious doubt re¬ 
garding the feasibility of our using this salt for maintaining the sup¬ 
ply of potash in our Colorado soils. 
CAN WE USE SUPERPHOSPHATES AND CHILI-SALTPETRE? 
The preceding considerations apply to the questions relative to 
phosphoric acid, whether it comes from Canadian apatite, or phos- 
phatic rock from Tennessee, South Carolina or Florida. They also 
apply to nitrogen, whether it is in sodic nitrate from Chili, or in 
dried blood, meat, etc., from the packing houses of Chicago. I 
have assumed throughout that the trade would by every means, con¬ 
sistent with a reasonable business proceedure, for it is always en¬ 
titled to a legitimate profit which no one ought to begrudge, en¬ 
deavor to make the use of such fertilizing materials profitable in 
order to extend their business. 
It, however, seems to me to be a serious question whether we 
can, with any hope of realizing a profit, look to these means of 
maintaining or restoring the fertility of our soils, except perhaps in 
a few special cases as, perhaps, in market gardening in the vicinity 
of our larger cities. 
BETTER PRACTICE REGARDINCx barnyard manure. 
In the past, even up to within a very few years, not more than 
three or four years ago, but little or any use was made of the 
manure accumulating about our towns and the corrals where hun¬ 
dreds of animals had been fed. Within the past year it has been 
possible for us to find piles of manure five, ten and even twenty 
years old, which have lain there just as they were piled when the 
corrals were cleaned out. 
At the present time this is one of the most important and, at 
the same time, available means for the maintenance of the produc¬ 
tiveness of our fields, i. e., the careful husbanding of all the prod¬ 
ucts of the farm which can economically be converted into a fer¬ 
tilizer—say into barnyard manure. 
Our former practice was, in cases where the alfalfa was fed 
upon the ranch where it was grown, to neglect the refuse or per¬ 
haps haul it out to dump it in some boggy place; if it were sold off 
of the farm no further account was taken of it—another crop would 
grow. So little appreciation of this subject, which is of the very 
greatest importance to the agriculture of this section, has heretofore 
been evinced, that it has been possible, within the three years last 
