meadow-hay, would contain 240 lbs. of nitrogen and 810 lbs. of
mineral matter. In other words, a cow eats 240 lbs. of nitrogen, and 25
lbs. are removed in the cheese, or not quite 10-1/2 per cent, and of
mineral matter not quite 2-1/2 per cent is removed. If it takes three
acres to produce this amount of food, there will be 8-1/3 lbs. of
nitrogen removed by the cheese, per acre, while 30 bushels of wheat
would remove in the grain 32 lbs. of nitrogen, and 10 to 15 lbs. in the
straw. So that a crop of wheat removes from five to six times as much
nitrogen per acre as a crop of cheese; and the removal of mineral matter
in cheese is quite insignificant as compared with the amount removed in
a crop of wheat or corn. If our grain-growing farmers can keep up the
fertility of their land, as they undoubtedly can, the dairymen ought to
be making theirs richer and more productive every year.

"All that is quite true," said the Doctor, "and yet from what I have
seen and heard, the farms in the dairy districts, do not, as a rule,
show any rapid improvement. In fact, we hear it often alleged that the
soil is becoming exhausted of phosphates, and that the quantity and
quality of the grass is deteriorating."

"There may be some truth in this," said I, "and yet I will hazard the
prediction that in no other branch of agriculture shall we witness a
more decided improvement during the next twenty-five years than on farms
largely devoted to the dairy. Grain-growing farmers, like our friend the
Deacon, here, who sells his grain and never brings home a load of
manure, and rarely buys even a ton of bran to feed to stock, and who
sells more or less hay, must certainly be impoverishing their soils of
phosphates much more rapidly than the dairyman who consumes nearly all
his produce on the farm, and sells little except milk, butter, cheese,
young calves, and old cows."

"Bones had a wonderful effect," said the Doctor, "on the old pastures in
the dairy district of Cheshire in England."

"Undoubtedly," I replied, "and so they will here, and so would
well-rotted manure. There is nothing in this fact to prove that dairying
specially robs the soil of phosphates. It is not phosphates that the
dairyman needs so much as richer manure."

"What would you add to the manure to make it richer?" asked the Doctor.

"Nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash," I replied.

"But how?" asked the Deacon.

"I suppose," said the Doctor, "by buying guano and the Ge