Talks on Manures Part 18

"The grain-grower will want no sheds for keeping off the rain, but, rather, he will desire more water than will fall on an open yard. The milkman will wish to protect his cow-dung from all rains, or even snows; so he is a great advocate of manure-sheds. These two cla.s.ses of farmers will adopt quite unlike methods of applying their manure to crops.

"I have cited these two cla.s.ses of farmers, simply to show the difficulty of making any universal laws in regard to the treatment and use of barn-yard manure. * * *

"I think you and I are fully agreed in regard to the farm being the true source of the manure that is to make the land grow better with use, and still produce crops--perhaps you will go with me so far as to say, the greater the crops, the more manure they will make--and the more manure, the larger the crops.

"Now, I object to any special farming, when applied to a whole great division of country, such as merely raising grain, or devoted entirely to dairying.

"I saw at Rome, N.Y., these two leading branches of New York farming united on the Huntington tract of 1,300 acres. Three or four farms (I forget which) had separate and distinct management, conducted by different families, but each had a dairy combined with the raising of large crops of grain, such as wheat, corn, oats, etc. These grain-crops, with suitable areas of meadow and pasture, sustained the dairy, and the cows converted much of the grain, and all of the forage, into manure.

Thus was combined, to mutual advantage, these two important branches of New York farming. Wheat and cheese to sell, and constant improvement in crops.

"In our own case, sheep have been combined with grain-raising. So we have sold wool, wheat, and barley, and, in all my life, not five tons of hay. Clover, you know, has been our great forage-crop. We have wintered our sheep mostly on clover-hay, having some timothy mixed with it, that was necessarily cut (to make into hay with the medium, or early clover,) when it was but gra.s.s. We have fed such hay to our cows and horses, and have usually worked into manure the corn-stalks of about 20 acres of good corn, each winter, and we have worked all the straw into shape to apply as manure that we could, spreading it thickly on pastures and such other fields as were convenient. Some straw we have sold, mostly to paper-makers."

"That," said the Deacon, "is good, old-fas.h.i.+oned farming. Plenty of straw for bedding, and good clover and timothy-hay for feed, with wool, wheat, and barley to sell. No talk about oil-cake, malt-combs, and mangels; nothing about superphosphate, guano, or swamp-muck."

Mr. Geddes and Mr. Johnston are both representative farmers; both are large wheat-growers; both keep their land clean and thoroughly cultivated; both use gypsum freely; both raise large crops of clover and timothy; both keep sheep, and yet they represent two entirely different systems of farming. One is the great advocate of clover; the other is the great advocate of manure.

I once wrote to Mr. Geddes, asking his opinion as to the best time to plow under clover for wheat. He replied as follows:

"Plow under the clover when it is at full growth. But your question can much better be answered at the end of a long, free talk, which can best be had here. I have many times asked you to come here, not to see fine farming, for we have none to show, but to see land that has been used to test the effects of clover for nearly 70 years. On the ground, I could talk to a willing auditor long, if not wisely. I am getting tired of being misunderstood, and of having my statements doubted when I talk about clover as the great renovator of land. You preach agricultural truth, and the facts you would gather in this neighborhood are worth your knowing, and worth giving to the world. So come here and gather some facts about clover. All that I shall try to prove to you is, that the fact that clover and plaster are by far the cheapest manures that can be had for our lands, has been demonstrated by many farmers beyond a doubt--so much cheaper than barn-yard manure that the mere loading of and spreading costs more than the plaster and clover. Do not quote me as saying this, but come and see the farms hereabouts, and talk with our farmers."

Of course I went, and had a capital time. Mr. Geddes has a magnificent farm of about 400 acres, some four miles from Syracuse. It is in high condition, and is continually improving, and this is due to growing large and frequent crops of clover, and _to good, deep plowing, and clean and thorough culture_.

We drove round among the farmers. "Here is a man," said Mr. G., "who run in debt $45 per acre for his farm. He has educated his family, paid off his debt, and reports his net profits at from $2,000 to $2,500 a year on a farm of 90 acres; and this is due to clover. You see he is building a new barn, and that does not look as though his land was running down under the system." The next farmer we came to was also putting up a new barn, and another farmer was enlarging an old one. "Now, these farmers have never paid a dollar for manure of any kind except plaster, and their lands certainly do not deteriorate."

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 1 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 2 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 gra.s.s 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 acc.u.mulated 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, b.u.t.ter, 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.

Why? Because these farmers do not half work their land, and the manure they make is little better than rotten straw. Mr. Lawes' wheat-field is plowed twice every year, and when I was there, the crop was hand-hoed two or three times in the spring. Not a weed is suffered to grow. And this is all there is to it.

Now, of course, instead of raising 15 bushels of wheat every year, it is a good deal better to raise a crop of 30 bushels every other year, and still better to raise 45 bushels every third year. And it is here that clover comes to our aid. It will enable us to do this very thing, and the land runs no greater risk of exhaustion than Mr. Lawes' unmanured wheat crop.

Mr. Geddes and I do not differ as much as you suppose. In fact, I do not believe that we differ at all. He has for years been an earnest advocate for growing clover as a renovating crop. He thinks it by far the cheapest manure that can be obtained in this section. I agree with him most fully in all these particulars. He formed his opinion from experience and observation. I derived mine from the Rothamsted experiments. And the more I see of practical farming, the more am I satisfied of their truth. Clover is, unquestionably, the great renovating crop of American agriculture. A crop of clover, equal to two tons of hay, when plowed under, will furnish more ammonia to the soil than twenty tons of straw-made manure, drawn out fresh and wet in the spring, or than twelve tons of our ordinary barn-yard manure. No wonder Mr. Geddes and other intelligent farmers recommend plowing under clover as manure. I differ from them in no respect except this: that it is not absolutely essential to plow clover under in the green state in order to get its fertilizing effect; but, if made into hay, and this hay is fed to animals, and all the manure carefully saved, and returned to the land, there need be comparatively little loss. The animals will seldom take out more than from five to ten per cent of all the nitrogen furnished in the food--and less still of mineral matter. I advocate growing all the clover you possibly can--so does Mr. Geddes. He says, plow it under for manure. So say I--unless you can make more from feeding out the clover-hay, than will pay you for waiting a year, and for cutting and curing the clover and drawing back the manure. If you plow it under, you are sure of it. There is no loss. In feeding it out, you may lose more or less from leaching, and injurious fermentation.

But, of course, you need not lose anything, except the little that is retained in the flesh, or wool, or milk, of the animals. As things _are_ on many farms, it is perhaps best to plow under the clover for manure at once. As things ought to be, it is a most wasteful practice. If you know how to feed out the hay to advantage, and take pains to save the manure (and to add to its value by feeding oil-cake, bran, etc., with it), it is far better to mow your clover, once for hay, and once for seed, than to plow it under. Buy oil-cake and bran with the money got from the seed, and growing clover-seed will not injure the land.

I am glad to hear that Mr. Geddes occasionally sells straw. I once sold 15 tons of straw to the paper-makers for $150, they drawing it themselves, and some of my neighbors criticised me severely for doing so. It is not considered an orthodox practice. I do not advocate selling straw as a rule; but, if you have more than you can use to advantage, and it is bringing a good price, sell part of the straw and buy bran, oil-cake, etc., with the money. To feed nothing but straw to stock is poor economy; and to rot it down for manure is no better. Straw itself is not worth $3.00 a ton for manure; and as one ton of straw, spread in an open yard to rot, will make, in spring, about four tons of so-called manure, and if it costs 50 cents a ton to draw out and spread it, the straw, even at this comparatively high estimate of its value, nets you, when fed out alone, or rotted down, only $1.00 a ton.

I had about 30 tons of straw. Fed out alone or rotted down it would make 120 tons of manure. After deducting the expense of hauling, and spreading, it nets me on the land, $30. Now sell half the straw for $150, and buy three tons of oil-cake to feed out with the other half, and you would have about seventy tons of manure. The manure from the fifteen tons of straw is worth, say $45, and from the three tons of oil-cake, $60, or $105. It will cost $35 to draw and spread it, and will thus net on the land, $70. So far as the manure question is concerned, therefore, it is far better to sell half your straw, and buy oil-cake with the money, than to feed it out alone--and I think it is also far better for the stock. Of course, it would be better for the farm, not to sell any of the straw, and to buy six tons of oil-cake to feed out with it; but those of us who are short of capital, must be content to bring up our land by slow degrees.

"I am at a loss to understand," wrote Mr. Geddes, "what you mean, when you say that a ton of straw will make, in the spring of the year, four tons of so-called manure. If you had said that four tons of straw would make one ton of manure, I should have thought nothing of it. But how you can turn one ton of straw into four tons of anything that anybody will call manure, I do not see. In a conversation I had with Hon. Lewis F.

Allen, of Black Rock, more than a year ago, he told me that he had enquired of the man who furnished hay for feeding cattle at the Central Yards, in Buffalo, as to the loads of manure he sold, and though I can not now say the exact quant.i.ty to a ton of hay, I remember that it was very little--far less than I had before supposed. Please explain this straw-manure matter."

Boussingault, the great French chemist-farmer, repeatedly a.n.a.lyzed the manure from his barn-yard. "The animals which had produced this dung, were 30 horses, 30 oxen, and from 10 to 20 pigs. The absolute quant.i.ty of moisture was ascertained, by first drying in the air a considerable weight of dung, and after pounding, continuing and completing, the drying of a given quant.i.ty." No one can doubt the accuracy of the results. The dung made in the

Winter of 1837-8, contained 79.6 per cent of water.

" " 1838-9, " 77.8 " " " "

Autumn " 1839, " 80.4 " " " "

Fresh solid cow-dung contains, according to the same authority, 90 per cent of water.

I have frequently seen manure drawn out in the spring, that had not been decomposed at all, and with more or less snow among it, and with water dripping from the wagon, while it was being loaded. It was, in fact, straw saturated with water, and discolored by the droppings of animals.

Now, how much of such manure would a ton of dry straw make? If we should take 20 lbs. of straw, trample it down, and from time to time sprinkle it with water and snow, until we had got on 80 lbs., and then put on 20 lbs. more straw, and 80 lbs. more water, and keep on until we had used up a ton of straw, how much "so-called manure," should we have to draw out?

2,000 lbs. of straw, and 8,000 lbs. water = 10,000 lbs. so-called manure.

In other words, we get five tons of such manure from one ton of straw.

This is, perhaps, an extreme case, but there can be little doubt, that a ton of straw, trampled down by cattle, and sheep, in an open barn-yard, exposed to snow and rain, would weigh four tons when drawn out wet in the spring.

Yes, it is quite an argument in favor of manure cellars. I have always had a prejudice against them--probably, because the first one I saw was badly managed. There is, however, no necessity, even in an ordinary open barn-yard, with more or less sheds and stables, of having so much water in the manure when drawn out. The real point of my remarks, which so surprised Mr. Geddes, was this: We have to draw out so much water with our manure, under any circ.u.mstances, that we should try to have it as rich as possible. It is certainly true, that, _if_ the manure from a ton of straw is worth $3, that from a ton of clover-hay, is worth $10. And it costs no more to draw out and spread the one than the other. I have never yet found a farmer who would believe that a ton of clover-hay, rotted down in the barn-yard, would make three or four tons of manure; but he would readily a.s.sent to the proposition, that it took four or five tons of green clover to make a ton of hay; and that if these four or five tons of green-clover were rotted in the yard, it would make three or four tons of manure. And yet, the only difference between the green-clover and the hay, is, that the latter has lost some 60 or 70 per cent of water in curing. Add that amount of water to the hay, and it will make as much manure as the green-clover from which the hay was made.

GYPSUM AND CLOVER AS MANURE.

A good farmer came in while we were talking. "Nothing like plaster and clover," he said, "for keeping up a wheat-farm." And you will find this the general opinion of nearly all American wheat-growers. It must be accepted as a fact. But the deductions drawn from the fact are as various as they are numerous.

Let us look first at the fact. And, if you like, we will take my own farm as an example. About 60 years ago, it was covered with the primeval forest. The trees, on the higher and drier land, were first cut down, and many of them burnt on the land. Wheat was sown among the stumps. The crop varied in different years, from 10 to 30 bushels per acre. When 30 bushels were grown, the fact was remembered. When 10 bushels only were grown, little was said about it in after years, until now there is a general impression that our wheat crops were formerly much larger per acre than now. I doubt it; but we will not discuss the point. One thing is certain, the land would produce good crops of clover; and when this clover was plowed under for manure, we got better crops of wheat afterwards. This was the rule. Later, we commenced to use gypsum as a top-dressing on clover. The effect was often wonderful. Farmers will tell you that they sowed 200 lbs. of plaster per acre, on their young clover, in the spring, and it _doubled the crop_. This statement expresses an agricultural, and not an arithmetical fact. We do not know that the crop on the plastered portion was twice as heavy as on the unplastered. We know that it was larger, and more luxuriant. There was a greater, and more vigorous growth. And this extra growth was caused by the small top-dressing of powdered gypsum rock. It was a great fact in agriculture. I will call it fact, No. 1.

Then, when the clover was turned under, we usually got good wheat. This is fact, No. 2. On these two facts, hang many of our agricultural theories. We may state these facts in many ways. Still, it all comes to this: Clover is good for wheat; plaster is good for clover.

There is another fact, which is a matter of general observation and remark. You rarely find a good farmer who does not pay special attention to his clover-crop. When I was riding with Mr. Geddes, among the farmers of Onondaga County, on pa.s.sing a farm where everything looked thrifty--good fences, good buildings, good garden, good stock, and the land clean and in good condition--I would ask who lived there, or some other question. No matter what. The answer was always the same. "Oh! he is another of our clover men." We will call this fact, No. 3.

And when, a year afterwards, Mr. Geddes returned my visit, and I drove him around among the farmers of Monroe County, he found precisely the same state of facts. All our good farmers were clover men. Among the good wheat-growers in Michigan, you will find the same state of things.