XVIII.
ALKALIS … SALT – ASHES – LIME
I do not know a rood of our country's surface so rich in all the materials which enter into the production of the Grains, Grasses, Fruits, and Vegetables, which are the objects and rewards of cultivation, that it could not be improved by the application of fertilizers; if there be such, I heartily congratulate the owners, and advise them not to sell. Nor do I believe that there are many acres so fertile that they would not produce more Indian Corn, more Hemp, more Cotton, and more of whatever may be their appropriate staple, if judiciously fertilized. If there be farms or fields originally so good that manure would not increase their yield, I am confident that the first half-dozen crops will have taken that conceit out of them. Prairies and river-bottoms may yield ever so bounteously; but that very luxuriance of growth insures their gradual exhaustion of certain elements of crops, which must needs be replaced or their product will dwindle. Whoever has sold a thousand bushels of grain, or its equivalent in meat, from his farm, has thereby impoverished that farm, unless he has applied something that balances its loss. "I perceive that virtue has gone out of me," observed the Saviour, because the hem of his garment had been touched; and every field that had been cropped might make a similar report whenever its annual loss by abstraction has not been balanced by some kind of fertilizer. The farmer who grows the largest crops is the most merciless exhauster of the soil, unless he balances his annual drafts (as good farmers rarely fail to do) by at least equal reënforcements of the productive capacity of his fields.
The good farmer begins by inquiring, "Wherein was my soil originally deficient? and of what has it been exhausted by subsequent crops?" I judge that my gravelly hill-sides would reward the application of two hundred loads (or tuns) of pure clay per acre, as I think the clay flats which border Lake Champlain would pay for a like application of sand or fine gravel where that material is found in convenient proximity; and yet, I know very well that, on at least three-fourths of our country's area, such application would cost far more than it would be worth. Every farmer must act on his knowledge of his soil and its peculiar needs, and not blindly follow the dictum of another. Yet I know few farms which, were they mine, I would not consider enhanced in value by a vigorous application of some alkaline substance – Lime, Salt, Ashes, or some of the cheaper Nitrates. I should be very glad to apply one thousand bushels of good house-made, hard-wood Ashes to my twenty acres of arable upland, if I could buy them, delivered, at twenty five cents per bushel; but they are not to be had. I doubt that there are a hundred acres of warm, dry, gravelly or sandy soil east of the Alleghanies that would not amply reward a similar application. But Ashes in quantity are unattainable, since no good farmer sells them, and Coal is the chief fuel of cities and villages. The Marls of New-Jersey I judge fully equal in average value to Ashes which have been nearly deprived of their potash by leaching, but not quite half equal, bushel for bushel, to unleached Ashes. I judge that average Marl is worth 10 cents per bushel where Ashes may be had for 25. But Marl is found only in a few localities, and a material worth but 10 cents per bushel will not bear transportation beyond 40 miles by wagon or 200 by water. Salt is only found or made at a few points, and is too dear for general use as a fertilizer. Where the refuse product of Salt-Works can be cheaply bought, good farmers will eagerly compete for it, if their lands at all resemble mine. I judge the tun of Potash I ordered fifteen years ago from Syracuse, paying $50 and transportation, was the cheapest fertilizer I ever bought. It was so impregnated with Salt (from the boiling over of the salt-kettles into the ashes) as to be worthless for other than agricultural purposes; but I mixed it with a large pile of Muck that I had recently dug, and, six or eight months thereafter, applied the product to a very poor, gravelly hill-side which I had just broken up; and the immediate result was a noble crop of Corn. That hill-side has not yet forgotten the application.
– If I should try to explain just how and why Lime is a fertilizer, I should probably fail; and I am well assured that liming has in some cases been overdone; yet I think most observers will concur in my statement that any region which has been limed year after year produces crops of noticeable excellence. I cite as examples Chester and Lancaster Counties, Pennsylvania, with Stark and adjacent counties of Ohio. Possibly, results equally gratifying might be secured by applying some other substance; I only know that frequently limed lands are generally good lands, as their crops do testify. I heartily wish that the flat clay intervales of Western Vermont could have a fair trial of the virtues of liming. I should expect to see them thereby rendered friable and arable; no longer changing speedily from the semblance of tar to that of brick, but readily plowed and tilled, and yielding liberally of Grain as well as Grass. I am confident that most farms in our country will pay for liming to the extent of fifty bushels per acre where the cost of quick-lime does not exceed ten cents per bushel; and most farmers, by taking, hot from the kiln, the refuse lime that is deemed unfit for building purposes, can obtain it cheaper than that.
I wish some farmer who gives constant personal attention to his work – as I cannot – would make some careful tests of the practical value of alkalis. For instance: the abundance and tenacity of our common sorrel is supposed to indicate an acid condition of the soil; and all who have tried it know that sorrel is hard to kill by cultivation. I suggest that whoever is troubled with it should cover two square rods with one bushel of quick-lime just after plowing and harrowing this Spring; then apply another bushel to four square rods adjacent; then make similar applications of ashes to two and four square rods respectively, taking careful note of the boundaries of each patch, and leaving the rest of the field destitute of either application. I will not anticipate the result: more than one year may be required to evolve it; but I am confident that a few such experiments would supply data whereof I am in need; and there are doubtless others whose ignorance is nearly equal to mine.
Many have applied Lime to their fields without realizing any advantage therefrom. In some cases, there was already a sufficiency of this ingredient in the soil, and the application of more was one of those many wasteful blunders induced by our ignorance of Chemistry. But much Lime is naturally adulterated with other minerals, especially with Manganese, so that its application to most if not to all soils subserves no good end. In the absence of exact, scientific knowledge, I would buy fifty bushels of quick-lime, apply them to one acre running through a field, and watch the effect. If it doesn't pay, you have a bad article, or your soil is not deficient in Lime.
XIX.
SOILS AND FERTILIZERS
A farmer is a manufacturer of articles wherefrom mankind are fed and clad; his raw materials are the soil and the various substances he mingles therewith or adds thereto in order to increase its productive capacity. His art consists in transforming by cultivation crude, comparatively worthless, and even noxious, offensive materials into substances grateful to the senses, nourishing to the body, and sometimes invigorating, even strengthening, to the mind.
I have heard of lands that were naturally rich enough; I never was so lucky or perchance so discerning as to find them. Yet I have seen Illinois bottoms whereof I was assured that the soil was fully sixteen feet deep, and a rich, black alluvium from top to bottom; and I do not question the statements made to me from personal observation that portions of the strongly alkaline plain or swale on which Salt Lake City is built, being for the first time plowed, irrigated, and sown to Wheat, yielded ninety bushels of good grain per acre. I never saw, yet on evidence believe, that pioneer settlers of the Miami Valley, wishing, some years after settling there, to sell their farms, advertised them as peculiarly desirable in that the barns stood over a creek or "branch," which swept away the manure each Winter or Spring without trouble to the owner; and I have myself grown both Wheat and Oats that were very rank and heavy in straw, yet which fell so flat and lay so dead that the heads scarcely bore a kernel. Had I been a wiser, better farmer, I should have known how to stiffen the straw and make it do its office, in spite of wind and storm.
[And let me here say, lest I forget it in its appropriate place, that I am confident that most farmers sow grain too thickly for any but very poor land. If one thinks it necessary to scatter three bushels of Oats per acre, I tell him that he should apply more manure and less seed – that land which requires three bushels of seed is not rich enough to bear Oats. He might better concentrate his manure on half so much land, and save two-thirds of his seed.]
I do not hold that the remarkably rich soils I have instanced needed fertilizing when first plowed; I will presume that they did not. Yet, having never yet succeeded in manuring a corn-field so high that a few loads more would not (I judge) have increased the crop, I doubt whether even the richest Illinois bottoms would not yield more Corn, year by year, if reënforced with the contents of a good barn-yard. And, when the first heavy crop of Corn has been taken from a field, that field – no matter how deep and fertile its soil – is less rich in corn-forming elements than it was before. Just so sure as that there is no depletion or shrinkage when nothing is taken from nothing, so sure is it that something cannot be taken from something without diminishing its capacity to yield something at the next call. Rotation of crops is an excellent plan; for one may flourish on that which another has rejected; but this does not overbear Nature's inflexible exaction of so much for so much. Hence, if there ever was a field so rich that nothing could be added that would increase its productive capacity, the first exacting crop thereafter taken from it diminished that capacity, and rendered a fresh application of some fertilizer desirable.
Years ago, a Western man exhibited at our Farmers' Club a specimen of the soil of his region which was justly deemed very rich, taken from a field whereon Corn had been repeatedly grown without apparent exhaustion. A chemical analysis had been made of it, which was submitted with the soil. It was claimed that nothing could improve its capacity for producing the great Illinois staple. Prof. Mapes dissented from this conclusion. "This soil," said he, "while very rich in nearly every element which enters into the composition of Corn, gives barely a trace of Chlorine, the base of Salt. Hence, if five bushels per acre of Salt be applied to that field, and it does not thereupon yield five bushels more per annum of Corn, I will agree to eat the field."
Many men fertilize their poor lands only, supposing that the better can do without. I judge that to be a mistake. My rule would be to plant the poorest with such choice trees as thrive without manure, and pile the fertilizers upon the better. It seems to me plain that of two fields, one of which has a soil containing nine-tenths of the elements of the desired crop, while the other shows but one to three-tenths, it is a more hopeful and less thankless task to enrich the former than the latter. If you are required to supply to a field nearly everything that your proposed crop will withdraw from it, I do not see where the profit comes in; but if you are required to supply but a tenth, because the soil as you found it stood ready to contribute the remaining nine-tenths, it seems to me that the margin for profit is here decidedly the greater.
How many tuns of earth ought a farmer to be obliged to turn over and over in order to obtain therefrom a hundred bushels of Corn? Two hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? Five thousand? Other things being equal, no one will doubt that, if he can make the Corn from one hundred tuns of soil, it were better to do so than to employ five hundred or five thousand. It seems clear to my mind that, though other conditions be unequal, it is generally well to endeavor to produce the required quantity from the smaller rather than the larger area.
I fully share the average farmer's partiality for barn-yard manure in preference to most, if not all, commercial fertilizers. In my judgment, almost any farmer who has cattle, with fit shelter and Winter fodder, can make fertilizers far cheaper than he can buy them. I judge that almost every farmer who has paid $100 or over for Guano (for instance), might have more considerably enriched his farm by drawing muck from some convenient bog or pond into his barn-yard in August or September and carting it thence to his fields the next Fall. If he can get no muck within a mile, let him cut, when they are in blossom, all the weeds that grow near him, especially by the road-side, cart them at once into his barn-yard, and there convert them into fertilizers. In Autumn, replace the hay-rack on the wagon or cart, and pile load after load of freshly-fallen leaves into your yard; taking them, if you may, from the sides of roads and fences, and from any place where they may have been lodged or heaped by the winds, your own wood-lot excepted. Plow the turf off of any scurvy lot or road-side, and pile it into the barn-yard; nay, dig a hundred loads of pure clay, and place it there, if you can get it at a small expense, and your average soil is gravelly or sandy. The farmer who is unable or reluctant to buy commercial fertilizers should apply his whole force every Autumn to replenishing his barn-yard with that material which he can obtain most easily which the trampling of his cattle may readily convert into manure. A month is too little, two months would not be too much, to devote to this good work. Some may seem obliged to postpone it to Winter; but that is to run the risk of embarrassment by frost or snow, and encounter the certainty that your material will be inferior in quality, or not so well fitted to apply to grain-crops the ensuing Fall.
– All this, you may say, is not instruction. We ought to know exactly what lands are enriched by Gypsum, and what, if any, are not; why these are fertilized, why those are not, by a common application; how great is the profit of such application in any case; and what substitute can most nearly subserve the same ends where Gypsum is not to be had. I admit all you claim, and do not doubt that there shall yet be a Scientific Agriculture that will fully answer your requirements. As yet, however, it exists but in suggestions and fragments; and attempts to complete it by naked assertions and sweeping generalizations tend rather to mislead and disgust the young farmer than really to enlighten and guide him. At all events, I shall aim to set forth as true no more than I know, or with good reason confidently believe.
I close by rëiterating my belief that no farmer ever yet impoverished himself by making too much manure or by applying too much of his own manufacture. I cannot speak so confidently of buying commercial fertilizers; but these I will discuss in my next chapter.
XX.
BONES – PHOSPHATES – GUANO
I hate to check improvement or chill the glow of Faith; yet I do so keenly apprehend that many of our people, especially among the Southern cotton-growers, are squandering money on Commercial Fertilizers, that I am bound to utter my note of warning, even though it should pass wholly unheeded. Let me make my position as clear as I can.
I live in a section which has been cultivated for more than two centuries, while its proximity to a great city has tempted to crop it incessantly, exhaustively. Wheat while its original surface soil of six to twelve inches of vegetable mold (mainly composed of decayed forest-leaves) remained; then Corn and Oats; at length, Milk, Beef, and Apples – have exhausted the hill-sides and gentler slopes of Westchester County, except where they have been kept in heart by judicious culture and liberal fertilizing; and, even here, that subtle element, Phosphorus, which enters minutely but necessarily into the composition of every animal and nearly every vegetable structure has been gradually drawn away in Grain, in Milk, in Bones, and not restored to the soil by the application of ordinary manures. I am convinced that a field may be so manured as to give three tuns of Hay per acre, yet so destitute of Phosphorus that a sound, healthy animal cannot be grown therefrom. For two centuries, the tillers of Westchester County knew nothing of Chemistry or Phosphorus, and allowed the unvalued bones of their animals to be exported to fatten British meadows, without an effort to retain them. Hence, it has become absolutely essential that we buy and apply Phosphates, even though the price be high; for our land can no longer do without them. Wherever a steer or heifer can occasionally be caught gnawing or mumbling over an old bone, there Phosphates are indispensable, no matter at what cost. Better pay $100 per tun for a dressing of one hundred pounds of Bone per acre than try to do without.
But no lands recently brought into cultivation – no lands where the bones of the animals fed thereon have been allowed, for unnumbered years past, to mingle with the soil – can be equally hungry for Phosphates; and I doubt that any cotton-field in the South will ever return an outlay of even $50 per tun for any Phosphatic fertilizer whatever. That any preparation of Bone, or whereof Bone is a principal element, will increase the succeeding crops, is undoubted; but that it will ever return its cost and a decent margin of profit, is yet to be demonstrated to my satisfaction.
No doubt, there are special cases in which the application even of Peruvian Guano at $90 per tun is advisable. A compost of Muck, Lime, &c., equally efficient, might be far cheaper; but months would be required to prepare and perfect it, and meantime the farmer would lose his crop, or fail to make one. If a tun of Guano, or of some expensive Phosphate, will give him six or eight acres of Clover where he would otherwise have little or none, and he needs that Clover to feed the team wherewith he is breaking up and fitting his farm to grow a good crop next year, he may wisely make the purchase and application, even though he may be able to compost for next year's use twice the value of fertilizers for the precise cost of this. But I am so thorough in my devotion to "home industry," that I hold him an unskillful farmer who cannot, nine times in ten, make, mainly from materials to be found on or near his farm, a pile of compost for $100 that will add more to the enduring fertility of his farm than anything he can bring from a distance at a cost of $150.
Understand that this is a general rule, and subject, like all general rules, to exceptions. Gypsum, I think every farmer should buy; Lime also, if his soil needs it; Phosphates in some shape, if past ignorance or folly has allowed that soil to be despoiled of them; Wood Ashes, if any one can be found so brainless as to sell them; Marl, of course, where it is found within ten miles; Guano very rarely, and mainly when something is needed to make a crop before coarser and colder fertilizers can be brought into a condition of fitness for use; but the general rule I insist on is this: A good farmer will, in the course of twenty or thirty years, make at least $10 worth of fertilizers for every dollar's worth he buys from any dealer, unless it be the sweepings or other excretions of some not distant city.
I have used Guano frequently, and, though it has generally made its mark, I never yet felt sure that it returned me a profit over its cost. Phosphates have done better, especially where applied to Corn in the hill, either at the time of planting or later; yet my strong impression is that Flour of Bone, applied broadcast and freely, especially when Wheat or Oats are sown on a field that is to be laid down to Grass, pays better and more surely than anything else I order from the City, Gypsum, and possibly Oyster-Shell Lime, excepted.
My experience can be no safe guide for others, since it is not proved that the anterior condition and needs of their soils are precisely like those of mine. I apprehend that Guano has not had a fair trial on my place – that carelessness in pulverizing or in application has caused it to "waste its sweetness on the desert air," or that a drouth following its application has prevented the due development of its virtues. And still my impression that Guano is the brandy of vegetation, supplying to plants stimulus rather than nutrition, is so clear and strong that it may not easily be effaced. It seems to me plainly absurd to send ten thousand miles for this stimulant, when this or any other great city annually poisons its own atmosphere and the adjacent waters with excretions which are of very similar character and value, and which Science and Capital might combine to utilize at less than half the cost of like elements in the form of Guano.
My object in this paper is to incite experiment and careful observation. No farmer should absolutely trust aught but his own senses. A Rhode Islander once assured me that he applied to four acres of thin, slaty gravel one hundred pounds per acre of Nitrate of Soda which cost him $4 per hundred, and obtained therefrom four additional tuns of good Hay, worth $15 per tun: Net profit (after allowing for the cost of making the Hay), say $30. He might not be so fortunate on a second trial, and there may not be another four acres of the earth's surface where Nitrate of Soda would do so well; but, should I ever have a fair opportunity, I mean to see what a little of that Nitrate will do for me. And I hope farmers may more and more be induced to conform in practice to the Apostolic precept, "Prove all things: Hold fast that which is good." No one's success or failure in a particular instance should be conclusive with others, because of the infinite diversity of antecedent and attendant circumstances; but if every thrifty farmer would give to each of the commercial fertilizers – Lime, Gypsum, Guano, Raw Bone, Phosphates, Ashes, Salt, Marl, etc. – such a careful trial as he might, observing closely and recording carefully the results, we should soon have a mass of facts and results, wherefrom deductions might be drawn of signal practical value to the present and to future generations.
I firmly believe that great results of signal beneficence are to be slowly but surely achieved by means of the household convenience known as the Earth-Closet, and by kindred devices for rendering inoffensive and utilizing the most powerful fertilizer produced on every farm and in every household. That is a vulgar squeamishness which leaves it to poison the atmosphere and offend the senses on the assumption that it is too noisome to be dealt with or utilized. A true refinement counsels that it be daily covered, and its odor absorbed or suppressed by earth, or muck, or ashes, and thus prepared for removal to and incorporation with the soil. It is far within the truth to estimate our National loss by the waste of this material at $1 per head, or $40,000,000 in all per annum: a waste which is steadily diminishing the productive capacity of our soil. This cannot, must not, be allowed to continue. We must devise or adopt some mode of securing and applying this powerful fertilizer; and I defer to that which is already in extensive and daily expanding use. Let whoever can do better; but meantime let us welcome and diffuse the Earth Closet.