MANURES

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1749, 13 September 1905, Page 59

MANURES

WHAT CHEMISTRY HAB DONE FOR FARMING.

The connection of chemistry with agriculture may appear to some farmers a remote one. That the work done with a lot of mysterious apparatus in some town laboratory is going to influence crop production seems, perhaps, too impossible to the farmer, and yet the new agriculture—the scientific agriculture, as we call it—has its foundation in chemistry. It was not until the analyst in the laboratory had found out the materials that form our soils and the substances which compose our crops that the information was forthcoming that explained unproductivity, and assisted in again restoring fertility. The chemist, then, is a man whose services, more, perhaps, than those of any other man, are indispensable to successful farming. * He has taken the soils of the farm and analysed them, discovered their deficiencies, and prescribed - methods for most economically supplying them; analysed crops, determined the various ingredients and the respective quantities of each annually removed from the soil, aud worked out formulae of fertilisers to most cheaply replace the loss. .He has investigated the physical texture of soil, shown how to impart, to a stiff, untractable clay a friable, mellow nature, or how to convert a light, leach.y sand into a soil of body and retentive power; offered a corrective for sourness, shown the ill effect of a surplus of soil moisture, and pointed out how to mitigate a paucity; in fact, has worked out solutions for numberless soil problems that confront the worker on the farm, and in the treats ment of land has replaced blind empiricism by sound science. The chemist has done very much more, and of quite equal value. He has taken the grasses and fodder plants of the farm, the hay, straw, grain, and oilcake, and analysed them. He has shown the great difference in. the feeding value of such materials, revealed the'' properties in each that go to the making of flesh and fat and milk; prescribed rations for our working horses, the growing beast, the milk cow ; shown that there is a science of feeding, as well as of manuring, and explaining its principles; taught that the usual method of feeding is a most wasteful one, and shown how it might be replaced by a more economical one; has, in fact; shown the farmer that there is a rational treatment for the stock he raises as well as the soil he cultivates. Again, the chemist has stretched out his hand to assist agriculture. He has taken, the wheat and barley, tbe fruit and the wine, and other vegetable products of the farm or orchard, and disclosed by analysis the failings or the qualities of each: has shown how the qualities of a barley may fit or unfit it as a malting sample, revealed the milling defects or qualities in a special wheat, the sugar percentage of a beet or cano, tiho qualities of to»baoco loaf, and in most cases indicated methods for the elimination of undesirable or the strengthening of desirable characteristics. The increase of gluten in the wheat grain, the rise of the percentage of sucrose in the beet, the modification of the nitrogen compounds in the malting barley, are changes that were not possible till the investigations of a chemical laboratory had preceded and pointed out the way.