Nashville union and American. [volume] (Nashville, Tenn.) 1868-1875, 1874-01-23

umns of your excellent paper, what is
the best fertilizer to use with cotton
seed. and how it should be used, etc.
| am entirely inexperienced in the use
of fertilizers, and the farmers of this
section have never used them; hence
my necessity for applying to you for
advice. ". H. HATCHER.
No other problem in agriculture is
more important than that of increasing
the fertilizing power of cotton seed,
and of other either natural or artificial
resources of the farm. 1t is in the ma
ture Of tillage to consume both plant
food and fertility, partly in agricultu-
raj salts washed out of cultivated
ground which run into branches,
swamps, creeks and the ocean, and
partly In crops that grow and are re-
moved from the field. SO far
as agricultural plants are form
ed of air and water, no res
titution In the shape of manure, wheth-
er homemade or imported, is neces-
sary, for rain, dew and atmospheric
gases viii supply the needful. But
crops and tillage remove from arated
land such salts of lime as land plaster
and bone-earth, which common rain
water and air do not return. Hence
the value Of these well known fertih-
zers. In converting the natural inso-
luble phosphate of lime found SO album
dainty near Charleston, S. c., into a
soluble superphosphate, the manufac-
turers of that city use large per cent
of sulphuric acid; and this strong acid
combining chemically with a part of
the lime in fossil bones and coprolites,
forms the sulphate of lme,' which is
land-plaster or gypsum. If our
correspondent is able to command cheap
transportation from Charleston of
super phosphates TO his plantation, one,
two or three hundred pounds of this
fertilizer per acre, mixed with cotton
seed, win probably pay well on corn,
cotton, oats, barley, grass, peas, sweet
or Irish potatoes. AS soils differ much
in quality and composition, one should
experiment with different commercial
manures, before he buys heavily of any
kind.
On many plantations a farmer may
collect, and purchase from others, bones
in considerable quantities to berendered
soluble with stable manure, adding
cotton seed, wood ashes, plaster or not.
There are several ways to treat cattle
bones and others on the farm. Fifty
years ago, and before any one
thought of using the oil of
yitriol, to dissolve bones, or mineral
phosphate called appetite, enterprising
farmers in Berkshire county, England,
broke bones with a sledge or axe and
mixed them in heap of hot horse
droppings, where in few weeks or
months, they became soft, aud the lime
and other salts in the bones were solu-
BILE in manure-water. A compost of
stable manure, cotton seed, ground
bones andw wood ashes, from which soap
has been made, form an excellent fer
tilizer. Many who cannot command
potash from wood ashes in any form,
purchase German potash salts to mix
with South Carolina phosphates, and
find that the investment pays. Cheap
fertilizers and cheap transportation
govern the whole question of killing
the planting lands and civiliza-
ton of the South, or not. We have in
the old slave-holding States to-day
over one hundred million acres of turn
ed out, depleted old fields; and we have
only to follow the same system of till
age and farm economy, to increase our
impoverished lands to four hundred
million acres, when our barren plains
Will be ike those of Syria, parts of
Persia, and Northern Africa. Corner
lots will then be as valuable in Men,
phis, Nashville and Atlanta, as they
now are Ninevah, Palmyra, Babylon
and Thebes. The easiest way to kill
any city is to exhaust the soil that
feeds and clothes its inhabitants
When they can live comfortably on air
and water alone, fertilizers viii have
neither value nor meaning.