Norwich bulletin., 1911-07-22
If We Are Receptive Experience Teaches Something New

CWritten Specially for The Bulletin.)
 If there is any one problem in the
 farmers year which has been talked
 and written and discussed to within
 an inch of death, it is the manure
 problem. Nevertheless, it is always
 with us. It is one of the two or three
 absolutely vital questions in farlIns.
 There are a few fundamental Iacts
 about it which seem to be settled. We
 have all also, learned some details
 which fit our own particular farms
 and crops. One reason why so many
 people dispute about the relative values
 of farm produced manures and con-
 mercial fertilizers is because they lS-
 nore or forget some of the settled
 facts. Another reason is because each
 one, having learned the whims of his
 peculiar soil, assumes unfairly that
 what is sauce for his goose IS sauce
 for all other ganders.
 One of the fundamental facts of crop
 growing is that practically all plants
 have to eat and breathe, just as much
 as animals. They take in nourish-
 ment through their roots, as animals
 take it through their stomachs. They
 breathe with their leaves, as animals
 breathe with their lungs. Give any
 animal all the air it wants. but stop
 its fodder, and it will die, in time.
 Give the same animal all the feed 1t
 needs, but shut off its wind. and it will
 die-in less than no time. It must
 have both food and air. We all know
 that. The same thing is just as true of tho plant. It must have both food
 and air. You can kill even quack-
 grass-kill it dead-kill it beyond the
 hope of any vegetable resurrection, if
 you will only make sure that it is never
 allowed to start leaf with which to
 breathe. You can do this, though your
 ground is so rich" l. e., so full of plant food, that the quack would riot in luxuriant growth-if it could only get a chance to breathe. The richest bit of garden land I have is a patch which used to be so matted and felted with quack that nothing else could find room to grow. The quack was killed by deliberately enhancing the richness not spear of grass was allowed 10 reach the air fors three months. It was smothered to death-had to die. because it couldn't breathe.
 Fortunately for us farmers, the plants we want to raise are usually able to get all the air they need, if we'll give them half chance. We don't have to help them out in that direction. But when it comes to their feeding, why, that's another matter. A much more difficult one to manage successfully.
 To begin with, it's perfectly clear 1 that, when a plant grows, it takes 1 something out of the soil to grow with. Last spring you had an acre of bare dirt, freshly plowed, with nott- l ing on it. Now that acre is occupied l with growing corn. When the crop l reaches full growth there will be from 1 10 to 20 tons of green cornstalks, etc, 1 on it. A considerable part of those 1 stalks is just water which will dry out. 1 But there will still be left some tons i of dry matter. It came out of the dirt. 1 That's as certain as anything well l can be- If you remove that entire 1 crop stalks, ears, and the rest, then | between you and the crop you will 1 have removed from your acre all the crops contains of matter which, before that crop grew, was in the dirt of your acre. Next year, when you plant corn ! again on that acre, the corn will have just that much less of those particular forms of matter to live on. This, also, l is about as certain as anything well 1 can be. By and by, if you continue 1 the process, you will have used up all there ever was in that acre on which i corn can feed, and then your crop will l fail.
 Why shouldn't it? If you take two 1 quarts of water day out of a six | quart pail, you'll empty it in three 1 days-if you don't put any back to re- l place what you've taken. If the corn l stalks take two .tons of corn food out ] of your acre every year, and you don't | put any corn food back, your acre will, | sooner or later, get empty of corn | food, and you won't get any more corn 1 off it. How are you going to return l that which the crop has eaten and you | have sold away?
 That's the wNole point of the manure l question.
 Years and years ago, farmers found | out by the simple method of trying it | that stable manure spread on the land | helped the crops to grow. The self evident facts were seen to be that l land produced better crops 1 than unmanured land. Also that, the l more manure you used, in reason, the l better it was for those creps-
 Then along comes some why farm 1 CT and wants to know the reason for this. So he tests and experiments and | gets chemists to analyze for him and | at last finds out just what things the | corn crop has taken out of his dirt, and how much of each. Furthermore, he finds out, by similar processes, about how much of these things he puts back with every load of stable manure. He discovers that when he