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Annual Report of the 
Allen is so strenuous for early sowing, it may be good; but I sowed 
it late and still it was good and I don’t know but I got as much 
benefit from the late sown plaster as I would had it been sown 
earlier. 
Mr. Porter. I want to say a very few words in reference to the 
subject of fertilizing our soil, and I am in harmony with all that 
Mr. Allen has said. I think he is perfectly right in reference to the 
instructions he has given us, so far as plaster is concerned, but 
there are other things connected with our fertilizing of importance 
to the whole people of the United States. 
If there be a single thing in the management of farms in which 
we are deficient, it is the one thing of fertilization. If we fertilize 
our farms and do it knowingly, without thoroughly thinking the 
subject over carefully, and becoming thoroughly aware that we are 
right, and right every time, we shall be living, as a part of us have 
been living and are living to-day, upon what we term exhausted soil. 
Well, the thing is a disgrace to every thinking farmer, to think 
that we live upon exhausted soil. In my opinion there ought to 
be no such word in the vocabulary of the farmer—there is no call for it. 
Why, your unworthy speaker was born upon the land his forefath¬ 
ers had lived on at the time of his birth over nine hundred and fifty 
years, and yet that farm was not exhausted by any means. It grew 
larger crops at the time I was a boy than it had ever grown at any 
time in the history of the farm, and I believe it is growing the same 
to-day. It never will be exhausted; and the farmer’s soil has no 
business to be exhausted. 
No farmer must say that his farm is exhausted, that he cannot 
grow this, that, and the other thing on the farm, because his land 
is not adapted to such and such crops. I know farmers all around 
me tell me their farms won't grow clover, they have tried it. And 
I said to one of my neighbors who was complaining that way, 
“you are about beat with that land, what will you take for it? 
And he says, “I will take so much.” I took it, and a few days ago 
he asked me, “ why could not I grow clover on that land as well as 
you.” Says I, “ you never tried.” “ Why,” said he, “I spent over 
two hundred and fifty dollars ip buying seed to put on that land, 
and I never could get anything.” Said I, “you did not try until it 
would grow nothing else.” He had gone on the idea of wheat, 
oats, and corn, and took everything off from it, and then he expected 
