HOW TO MAKE A FARM RICH BY GROWING CLOVER. Not by growing the clover, and selling it. Nothing would exhaust the land so rapidly as such a practice. We must either plow under the clover, let it rot on the surface, or pasture it, or use it for soiling, or make it into hay, feed it out to stock, and return the manure to the land. If clover got its nitrogen from the atmosphere, we might sell the clover, and depend on the roots left in the ground, to enrich the soil for the next crop. But if, as I have endeavored to show, clover gets its nitrogen from a weak solution in the soil, it is clear, that though for a year or two we might raise good crops from the plant-food left in the clover-roots, yet we should soon find that growing a crop of clover, and leaving only the roots in the soil, is no way to permanently enrich land. I do not say that such a practice will “exhaust” the land. Fortunately, while it is an easy matter to impoverish land, we should have to call in the aid of the most advanced agricultural science, before we could “exhaust” land of its plant-food. The free use of Nitrate of Soda, or Sulphate of Ammonia, might enable us to do something in the way of exhausting our farms, but it would reduce our balance at a bank, or send us to the poor-house, before we had fully robbed the land of its plant-food. To exhaust land, by growing and selling clover, is an agricultural impossibility, for the simple reason that, long before the soil is exhausted, the clover would produce such a poverty-stricken crop, that we should give up the attempt. We can make our land poor, by growing clover, and selling it; or, we can make our land rich, by growing clover, and feeding it out on the farm. Or, rather, we can make our land rich, by draining it where needed, cultivating it thoroughly, so as to develope the latent plant-food existing in the soil, and then by growing clover to take up and organize this plant-food. This is how to make land rich by growing clover. It is not, in one sense, the clover that makes the land rich; it is the draining and cultivation, that furnishes the food for the clover. The clover takes up this food and concentrates it. The clover does not create the plant-food; it merely saves it. It is the thorough cultivation that enriches the land, not the clover. “I wish,” writes a distinguished New York gentleman, who has a farm of barren sand, “you would tell us whether it is best to let clover ripen and rot on the surface, or plow it under when in blossom? I have heard that it gave more nitrogen to the land to let it ripen and rot on it, but as I am no chemist, I do not know.”