QUESTION BOX.

How can we best keep up the fertility of our soils?

Judge Bryant-I would say, in a very few words, by putting back on the land what nature intended should go on. I call the attention of every farmer to what he is wasting that ought to go back upon the land. Our prominent men and institutions are setting a wrong example. At the insane asylum they have got a sewer that takes the contents of the privies of that great institution into the lake, and right near it they have another thing that pumps the water back, which is used for drinking and other purposes. I believe that is all wrong. I believe that any farmer who permits the contents of the vessels taken from his bed chambers to be carried away and emptied into a hole in the ground, commits a sin. It ought to be saved and put on the land to enrich it.

I was talking with Mr. Rublee, the minister from this country to Switzerland for a number of years, and he told me that in that country every bit of all that kind of stuff is preserved and utilized. Every farmer has a little compost heap behind his house, covered up with straw and thatches and dirt, and disinfectants kept on it to keep it from smelling, and it is all used and put back on the land. As you are traveling along the road you will see boys with little carts, sometimes drawn by a dog, and sometimes by themselves, and every time anything drops from a passing horse it is taken up and put in the little cart and carried to the compost heap; and mind you, that boy does not go past the boundary line of the farm that his father owns, because the next man's boy is out for the same thing. In this country we are wasting all these things. I was out in Minnesota the other day on the Chippewa river, at a nice, smart town that had just sprung up there. They have a street that runs along the river bank for a mile, one side on the river and the other backs up on the prairie. The people on the river side are boasting how much better off they are than their neighbors because they can shove the manure out of their barns into the river and have it carried away.

They are doing the same thing in this city; they are doing it in this capitol. There are thousands of loads of fertilizers going

and a little ways

out under the streets and into the Third lake below they are cutting the ice and sending it to Chicago while the land all around the city wants it. I knew a lawyer (they say lawyers don't know much about farming) — I knew a lawyer of this city that owned a farm, and lived upon it, four miles out, who made one of these little compost places, where he required all this excrescence of his home to be emptied, and once or twice a week he would take his wheelbarrow, and put it on the land. He made his farm blossom like the rose. A great many folks think this would kill the country. I know very well when I first went to farming, and hauled the contents of the vaults from this capitol out to my farm, my neighbors had a meeting on that subject, and at a sewing circle it was decided they ought to go and see the judge, and stop him from taking that stinking stuff into the neighborhood.

Now anybody that comes out to my place can see the results of it. One man was to my farm a few days since and said to me, "What are you going to do with your hay?" I said, "I don't know." Said he, "Why don't you keep more cattle?" I told him to go up to the barn and see how many I had. He said, "I never saw a man in this country keep so many cattle on so small a place." It all comes from this bad smelling stuff I carried there several years ago.

Mr. Smith-It is known to some of you that I am a strong advocate of manure, and a great deal of it, for all times and places and for all kinds of crops. Last year I used about four hundred two horse loads of manure and two thousand bushels of ashes, a number of tons of hen manure, a number of barrels of plaster and some bone dust.

Now I will simply state in a few words how I dispose of the refuse from my house. I have a pit dug that will hold two or three wagon loads of earth. Where I live I generally get the street manure from the city; that always being fine in the spring when it is dry, I haul that in and fill up the pit. Then I have a trough leading from the back of my house to the pit, into which are poured all the slops of the house of all kinds, and they run into the pit. When it is filled as full as it will hold, I take it out

and haul it off to the compost heap, and fill up the pit again. All the soap suds, the dish water and the water from the bed

If we have a load of manure on the place, of course it goes into the compost heap, and then during the summer I have the street manure from the city, and I also have a team employed a great part of the time in gathering up everything from my grounds. All the refuse, the potato tops, the turnip tops, the cabbage leaves and weeds of all kinds - I do not intend to have weeds grow, but they will in spite of all I can do, and they all go into the compost heap, or into the hog-pen, and they work it over, and from there it finds its way to the compost heap. A year ago last summer I had about twenty hogs, and with those I had about two hundred two-horse loads of manure; the manure was worth more than the pork. I could have sold it for more than I could the hogs.

Mr. Shivley - This compost heap of stuff will do for city manure, but when you go out onto a farm, you have got to work on a larger scale. I have a little farm in Rock county, in the town of Woodville, and we keep a few cattle and a few of everything. That has always been my plan, to keep a little of everything, but the principal stock is sheep. We raise more corn than any other crop; calculate to cut up from fifteen to twenty acres of corn every year, mostly Yankee corn; and we keep from one hundred to one hundred and fifty sheep over the winter, and probably two hundred and fifty stock sheep. Some say sheep do not amount to much for manure. You can make more manure out of a hundred dollars' worth of sheep than out of a hundred dollars worth of any other kind of stock you can put it into.

Mr. Smith-You would be surprised at the size of the compost heap that you can make in that way, by gathering together the refuse of your farm. Any farmer can do it. I spoke of this manner of disposing of the refuse of the house because it is a good way of getting rid of it. It ceases to be a nuisance, and you are getting something valuable, and it is a matter of cleanliness and a matter of health; and every man who has a farm of a hundred acres, if he will go to work in that way, making use of

the days and parts of days when he can spare his man, letting him take the horses and gather up all the refuse in the field, when he gathers his squashes, take his squash vines, and when he digs his potatoes, take his potato tops, and gather up all the weeds, and you will find you can make an immense compost heap, and a very valuable one. I know it by a good many years' experience. It is not expensive to work it over. I have one heap now that I think I shall get three hundred loads from in the spring. The most of it has been worked over once, but we shall work it all over again in the spring, and it will be done in a few days, and then I shall have about three hundred loads of fine manure. You can put it on the ground after you have plowed, or if you have grass ground, put it onto that. You cannot put it amiss. It will pay, and pay largely.

And there is another advantage- the pay comes right away. You get the pay on the first crop when it is in that shape. If you had plenty of money, or could use your man in the few leisure days you have occasionally — could set him at something where he could earn a couple of dollars, and could take that money and buy some fertilizers with it, it is possible you could buy the same amount of fertilizing material that you could get in this way, but you would have to pay the money for it, and this way you get it without doing that. The material lies loose all around you; you are only gathering it up and putting it into shape, so that it will work itself up and become of value to you the coming year; turning your labor into money and improving your land at the same time.

Mr. Chipman - How much more benefit is there in gathering up the vines of the potatoes and squashes than there is in letting them remain on the ground where they grew.

Mr. Smith If you are going to plow immediately, I do not know that there is any more. Last year I plowed my squash ground right under instead of taking the vines to the compost heap, and a portion of the tomato vines I did in the same way; but to let them stay there all winter and blow away, is not a good way to do.

Mr. Chipman I have had better success in putting coarse

straw manure right on the ground, and letting it lie, than with the compost heap. The best success I have ever had with the coarse manure was to put it on the ground in the spring and plow it in; and as to grass ground, there is no kind of manure I have ever put on that does as much good as coarse straw manure spread on thin.

Mr. Olds In regard to locating this compost heap so that it is conveniently accessible to receive all the slops from the house, how is it arranged so as not to cause offensive odors that might be detrimental to the health of the family?

Mr. Smith As far as that is concerned, mine is about 75 feet from the house and just a square pit, perhaps ten feet square and two or three feet deep, large enough to hold one or two wagon loads. If I don't have the street manure I get some dry earth. The compost heap is in the middle of my grounds, where I can get at it easily. In regard to using straw, that reminds me of an incident that occurred in my neighborhood a number of years ago. A gentleman came to me and said, "You claim that straw is not worth anything for manure." "Well," said I, "chemical analysis shows that straw is not very valuable for that purpose." Said he, "four or five years ago I had a stack of straw that I did not know what to do with, so as I was plowing the ground I concluded to plow it under, and I turned it under six or eight inches deep, and I have had very much better crops on that ground ever since, and I can see the effects of it yet." I happened to know the field well. It was a very rich piece of land and it was very heavy and black, almost a muck, underlaid with a clay that was as tight as a stone jug, so I said to him, "That is precisely what I should expect from the use of straw upon that land." I asked him if the land was not loose now where it had previously been in the habit of packing. "Yes," said he, "it has been loose and mellow ever since." Said I, "Of course it is, and will be until the effect of that straw is all gone. The land was rich enough to raise good crops without the straw, but it was the mechanical effect produced by the use of the straw that made it valuable."

Now suppose I had gone onto some land where a portion of it was almost pure sand, and had gone and bought some straw, and