The only stable manure I use on my crops is that made by my cow. All my
other fertilizers are artificially produced. In the course of the year,
in prosecuting my regular business, I render some two hundred thousand
pounds of tallow. This is all done by boiling it with sulphuric acid.
The acid attacks and decomposes the animal tissue, leaving the rendered
tallow floating on its surface. A part of the dissolved animal tissue,
together with the bones that are sometimes smuggled in with the rough
fat, settles to the bottom of the tanks, and a part remains dissolved
in the acid. This spent acid, together with the deposit in the bottom
of the tanks, is the source of all my nitrogen, except what may be in
the manure from the cow, as well as a portion of my phosphorous. I have
occasion to use considerable of the potash of commerce in some of my
manufactures. For my land, I make of this a saturated solution, and then
dry it, by stirring into it a mixture of equal parts of ground plaster
and sifted coal ashes. This, in a few days, becomes sulphate of potash,
lime, and coal ashes, at least I judge that it does, for it loses all its
causticity.
In preparing my fertilizers, I mix the product of my tanks with loam,
near the place to be planted; this, in the spring, is dug over and mixed
with the manure from the stable. The effect of this mixing is to make
the manure very fine in a very short time. After plowing, this compost
is spread upon the land, and harrowed in. I then follow with ground
bone, which costs me, delivered at my place, bolted, twenty-five dollars
per ton, at the rate of twelve hundred pounds to the acre, and with the
potash mixture, at the rate of two hundred and forty pounds to the acre,
which is also harrowed in. In distributing the potash, I distribute more
of it where I intend to plant peas or potatoes, and less where I intend
to plant corn, squashes, and turnips. In distributing the bone, I reverse
this. It is on a light, sandy loam, fertilized in this manner, with an
excess of nitrogen, no doubt, that I expect, the coming summer, to raise
enough feed for a cow on less than half an acre of ground. The land on
which my experiment was tried last year was a turned sod that had had no
manure of any kind for more than ten years. This year it will be tried on
land that was manured as above last year.
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