Clarksville weekly chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 1873-1890, 1879-08-09

renovate his soil, and his working
are several score of oxen.
They are engaged in extracting
from the turnips what they have
borrowed from the soil and max
ing them repay it to the uttermost |
farthing with interest to date. They
are standing belly-deep in wheat |
and barley straw, and as they tram
pie it down and saturate it with !
their secretions, more and more
straw is added ungrudgingly, for the
farmer knows that his patient chem
lists are Transforming it into bet
ter fertilizers than can be bought at
the stores, and in the end when
spring-time comes and the pasture
in the meadows is rich, the cattle
leave the laboratory in which they
have been so faithfully working to
Craze on pastures new, and the
grateful farmer finds six or eight
feet deep of manure, such as nc
chemist less efficient than the afore-
said oxen can produce, for there is
the wheat and barley straw, itself
rich in silieates and lime, trampled
into a compact mass and saturated
with the secretions of the animals,
in which are contained all the
chemical principles which had been
extracted from the soil by the
turnips, beets and hay on which the
animal had been feeding. And
there is your renovator and fertilizer
containing exactly what the tur-
nips had borrowed from the land
and exactly what the wheat crops
require from it, for it originally
came from that very source, being
gathered from it and stored up by
the wheat and barley and hay and
turnip crops of former years, and
reduced to a condition of renewed
fertilizing capacity by passing
through the organization of the
living laboratories we have just
been describing.
So we say to Goostree, don't sell
your turnips; they owe debt to
thesOil which, if you sell them, they
will never pay, but leave your soil
their bankrupt creditor, but if you
feed them to your stock on the
farm, they will repay capital and
interest for all they have borrowed
| from it.
Reader, the agricultural system
we have been abiding to is known
in England as the Norfolk four
course system. 1t has prospered in
England for centuries, and viii
prosper because it is based upon one
of the prOfoundest principles in nat
ural science, the supplementary
relation between the animal and
vegetable kingdoms whereby each
produces what the other consumes.
Two hundred years ago King
Charles II. said that the county of
Norfolk was only fit to be cut in
slices to make roads for the rest of
his kingdom, and yet, during these
two hundred years it has been pro-
ducing abundant stores of grain,
roots and hay, beef, mutton and
pork, and is now much richer than
it was in King Charles day. Is
there not more sense in treating the
land in this way than in scratching
its surface for a few years to get
from it its spontaneous products and
then abandoning it as acOTR-Out,
which it naturally is, because you
have all the time been taking from
it and returning nothing, borrowing
from the soil and never paying your
debts to it.
p. Son re-perusing the above
we find that without explanation it
is liable to be misunderstood in an
important respect. We are not OPP
posing the use of artificial fertilizers
the very best farmers in both Europe
and America find it to their adyant-
age, after econOmizing every natur-
! al resource for fertilizing the soil,
to supplement these with one
or another of the many excellent
fertilizers now on sale. What we
were cOndemning was the eXtrava-
| gance of relying upon these eXclus-
lively and wasting the vast resources
for fertilization which the farm its
lelf, if wisely managed, supplies.
After utilizing these to the utmost
it will in most cases be profitable to
superadd the artificial manures, fer
tilizers and repovatOrs.