Livestock Farming

Categories: STABLE MANURE

The fertility of the soil is most safely guarded in

regions devoted to livestock farming. "Selling everything off the farm"

is a practice associated in the public mind with soil poverty. It is a

rule with few exceptions that the absence of livestock on the farm is

an index of gradual reduction in the productive power of the land.

Generally speaking, the farmers who feed the most of their crops on the

farm are maintaini g fertility, and those who do not feed their crops

on the farm have been making drafts upon the soil's stores of available

plant-food that are evidenced in a reduction of yields. These

statements will have the assent of all careful observers. The inference

has been that the maintenance of fertility requires the return to the

land of all the manure that would result from feeding its crops on the

farm. We know that by such feeding we can return to the fields at least

four fifths of all the plant-food taken out by the crops, and we

loosely reason that such a scheme is demanded by nature. The

maintenance of fertility involves good arithmetic, and a plant must

have certain weights of mineral elements at command before it can grow,

but it is not true that the productive power of land is chiefly

dependent upon the return to it in manure of all the fertility removed

by its crops. If this were true, meat and other animal products would

be the sole food supply of the world's markets.