From Syracuse, I went to Geneva, to see our old friend John Johnston. “Why did you not tell me you were coming?” he said. “I would have met you at the cars. But I am right glad to see you. I want to show you my wheat, where I put on 250 lbs. of guano per acre last fall. People here don’t know that I used it, and you must not mention it. It is grand.”
I do not know that I ever saw a finer piece of wheat. It was the Diehl variety, sown 14th September, at the rate of 1¼ bushels per acre. It was quite thick enough. One breadth of the drill was sown at the rate of two bushels per acre. This is earlier. “But,” said Mr. J., “the other will have larger heads, and will yield more.” After examining the wheat, we went to look at the piles of muck and manure in the barn-yard, and from these to a splendid crop of timothy. “It will go 2½ tons of hay per acre,” said Mr. J., “and now look at this adjoining field. It is just as good land naturally, and there is merely a fence between, and yet the grass and clover are so poor as hardly to be worth cutting.”
“What makes the difference?” I asked.
Mr. Johnston, emphatically, “Manure.”
The poor field did not belong to him!
Mr. Johnston’s farm was originally a cold, wet, clayey soil. Mr. Geddes’ land did not need draining, or very little. Of course, land that needs draining, is richer after it is drained, than land that is naturally drained. And though Mr. Johnston was always a good farmer, yet he says he “never made money until he commenced to drain.” The accumulated fertility in the land could then be made available by good tillage, and from that day to this, his land has been growing richer and richer. And, in fact, the same is true of Mr. Geddes’ farm. It is richer land to-day than when first plowed, while there is one field that for seventy years has had no manure applied to it, except plaster. How is this to be explained? Mr. Geddes would say it was due to clover and plaster. But this does not fully satisfy those who claim, (and truly), that “always taking out of the meal-tub and never putting in, soon comes to the bottom.” The clover can add nothing to the land, that it did not get from the soil, except organic matter obtained from the atmosphere, and the plaster furnishes little or nothing except lime and sulphuric acid. There are all the other ingredients of plant-food to be accounted for—phosphoric acid, potash, soda, magnesia, etc. A crop of clover, or corn, or wheat, or barley, or oats, will not come to perfection unless every one of these elements is present in the soil in an available condition. Mr. Geddes has not furnished a single ounce of any one of them.
“Where do they come from?”
I answer, from the soil itself. There is probably enough of these elements in the soil to last ten thousand years; and if we return to the soil all the straw, chaff, and bran, and sell nothing but fine flour, meat, butter, etc., there is probably enough to last a million years, and you and I need not trouble ourselves with speculations as to what will happen after that time. Nearly all our soils are practically inexhaustible. But of course these elements are not in an available condition. If they were, the rains would wash them all into the ocean. They are rendered available by a kind of fermentation. A manure-heap packed as hard and solid as a rock would not decay; but break it up, make it fine, turn it occasionally so as to expose it to the atmosphere, and with the proper degree of moisture and heat it will ferment rapidly, and all its elements will soon become available food for plants. Nothing has been created by the process. It was all there. We have simply made it available. So it is with the soil. Break it up, make it fine, turn it occasionally, expose it to the atmosphere, and the elements it contains become available.
I do not think that Mr. Geddes’ land is any better, naturally, than yours or mine. We can all raise fair crops by cultivating the land thoroughly, and by never allowing a weed to grow. On Mr. Lawes’ experimental wheat-field, the plot that has never received a particle of manure, produces every year an average of about 15 bushels per acre. And the whole crop is removed—grain, straw, and chaff. Nothing is returned. And that the land is not remarkably rich, is evident from the fact that some of the farms in the neighborhood, produce, under the ordinary system of management, but little more wheat, once in four or five years than is raised every year on this experimental plot without any manure.