NEW YORK, MAY 17, 1924 
Entered as Second-Class Matter. June 26. 1879. at the Cost 
Office at New York, N. Y.. under the Act of March 3. 1879 
NO. 4795 
VOT T V'V’Y'TTT Published Weekly by The Rural Publishing Co.. 
yyju. iiAAAlli. 333 W. 30th St., New York. Price One Dollar a Year 
Running, A Farm w\Aout Live -Stock 
OTING in The R. N.-Y. that you often 
take the role of farm adviser, I ven¬ 
ture to lay before you one of my prob¬ 
lems. About four years ago I bought 
this farm of 122 acres, 60 acres un¬ 
der cultivation, all in the worst pos¬ 
sible state, having been practically deserted for sev¬ 
eral years. Ditches and ditch banks had not been 
touched for 20 years at least, and brush was grow¬ 
ing all over the fields. Now we have nearly all the 
land cleared up, and it looks like a farm. This place 
is five miles from the late Prof. Massey’s celebrated 
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crop without it. The price on railroad cat. some¬ 
thing over $5 per ton; cost of cartage is not less 
than $1.50 per ton, making $6.50 per ton. The value 
of fertilizer it contains does not exceed $2 at the 
prices 1 am now paying. I decided from the first 
that I could not afford any city manure at any such 
price, although the neighbors told me I couldn’t 
grow truck if I didn’t use it. You can see the quan¬ 
tity I was making at home is really negligible, and 
I have not been able to afford the quantity of fer¬ 
tilizer I should like to have used; nevertheless, the 
crops on the farm are improving from year to year, 
my stock, or shall I reduce that feed labor by half 
and buy a tractor and truck and depend upon fer¬ 
tilizer and some cover crop turned under to keep my 
land improving? I have lived in Western Canada, 
where they proved it was economy to burn manure 
rather than put it on the land. 
I believe the manure pile, from its cradle to its 
grave, has done more to drive the boys from the 
farm than any other one thing, and as my two boys 
are going to stick to the farm I feel duty bound to 
give the old muck heap the kick it should have had 
the day concentrated fertilizer was produced. I have 
Cherry Picking on the Minch Farm, in ftonth Jersey. Fig. 281 
garden, although the soil is somewhat different, 
varying from sand to black low clay, and the inter¬ 
mediate grades. We are growing strawberries, cu¬ 
cumbers, cantaloupes, asparagus, sweet and Irish 
potatoes, cow peas, Soy beans, rye and vetch and 
corn; also clover. I started with two horses; the 
manure made from them would scarcely cover two 
acres with a fair coat. At the present time I have 
four mules and two cows, and what I get from them 
will cover something less than six acres. Situated 
as I am, this is about all the stock I can handle, so 
if I treat all the land alike it will take me 10 years 
to manure the whole farm. The farmers in this 
county buy hundreds of cars of city manure every 
year, and many of them think they cannot grow a 
and last season there was no farm in the district 
that could beat them. 
Without doubt some of this land has never had 
any coarse manure on it, and none of it had any fer¬ 
tilizer for five years before I took it in hand. Gall¬ 
ing to mind Sir John Dawes’ Itothamsted experi¬ 
mental plot of wheat which has beaten the world 
for production, and many different fields that r per¬ 
sonally know have never had any farm manure for 
anything from 20 to 40 years, yet continued to pro¬ 
duce good crops, it seems to me that the time we 
have spent trying to produce lots of manure would 
have given better results if we had used it in some 
productive manner. My problem is, shall r con¬ 
tinue to work nearly half my farm to feed and bed 
no doubt many of your readers will think I have 
bees in the belfry, but if they will quietly sit and 
think of the increased acreage production in this and 
other countries since the introduction of artificial 
manure, notwithstanding the large number of farms 
that have run down through poor farming, they will 
surely think there is something in the idea worth 
considering. I would better say before, closing I 
have no interest in any fertilizer firm. I am one of 
those farmers they have little use for, as I mix my 
own, which saves me anything from $10 to $15 per 
ton, and thus r can use more of a better grade. 
Maryland. h. t. r. 
R. N.-Y.—This is not a new idea. Nearly 30 years 
ago we fully described a system of farming known 
