Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/370

356 procured samples of fertilizers offered for sale, which were also analyzed. Excellent fertilizers were found, others little better than good surface soil; but the price of all was too much in excess of their valuation, or, in other words, the crude materials from which the fertilizers were mixed could have been bought by the farmers for much less than the fertilizers themselves. Finally, the analyses were published, with the poor ones and frauds fearlessly assailed, and the best ones pointed out. The result was inevitable. Honest fertilizer manufacturers co-operated with the station. Other States than Connecticut passed the necessary laws, took up the same work, found the same conditions and eradicated them; so that to-day the average cost of fertilizers exceeds their valuation barely enough to pay for mixing, while frauds have almost totally disappeared. When we consider that hundreds of thousands of tons of commercial fertilizers, averaging at least thirty dollars per ton, are annually applied to our soils, we can scarcely overestimate the value of this one line of work. The Director of the New York Station, Dr. Peter Collier, calculated in 1888 that the effect of twenty years of fertilizer control had been an average saving of 61*43 per cent in the cost of the three constituents of plant-food which are liable to be deficient in soils. The German experiment stations have had very similar experience.

It has long been known that no single plant furnishes the kind and amount of nutriment to give the best results with animals when fed to them, and farmers have used varying combinations of greater or less value for years. The German experiment stations took up, among their earlier investigations, the determination of the basis upon which the efficiency of these combinations rested, and after years of study it was found that it was due in the main to the relation existing between the digestible nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous constituents of the food; that the ratio between these ought to vary according to the purposes for which the animal was fed; and the amount of digestible nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous food which was necessary for the various purposes was determined. The tables thus given to the world by German investigation have been found to not wholly agree with our conditions, but they have been of invaluable service in applying the sound principle which underlies them to American stock-feeding; and it has been an important part of the work of our experiment stations to adapt them to our somewhat different needs. A large amount of success has attended their efforts, and, while the principle of feeding, according to the chemical composition of the food, can not as yet be said to be of anything like general application in the United States, still it is quite widely used, with greater or less success. For the more important purposes for which animals are fed, our ordinary plants, with the exception of some of the leguminosæ,