A German proverb says: “The manure pile is the farmer’s bank.” All farmers these days know the value of good manures, which accounts for their buying so much commercial fertilizer, but some day they will know the value of saving the whole of the stable and barnyard manures, so as to avoid the cost of commercial fertilizers. Then there will be less of that unscientific talk of “depleted soils,” and no grumbling about “decreased yields.” Sea-weeds, ashes, “mucks” and bones are all valuable as manures if handled properly. The Maine Agricultural Experiment Station, at Orono, Me., has published a bulletin, No. 74, on the manurial values of these, which will be sent upon application, and is well worth the reading. The farmer should remember that commercial fertilizers are only to be used to supplement manure, not to take its place, and that when he buys any, it must be the best. He cannot afford anything else. The man who says, “I know my land needs potash, but I cannot afford to buy it,” is making a mistake. Suppose he should say “I know my children need bread, but I cannot afford to buy flour!” His neighbors would think he had gone crazy. It is just as foolish to deny his land what it needs. He should get whatever it needs; for if a soil needs any certain ingredient, whether potash, phosphoric acid or nitrogen, it is cheap at a high price, while anything else is dear at a low price. Your soil must be fed as surely as your children must. You can get credit at the store or at the bank to buy fertilizer, when you could not get it to buy an automobile. Potash is really one of the cheapest fertilizer elements on the market, but farmers get the idea that it is high because it is present in large quantities in all high-grade fertilizers, and almost absent from cheap grades. Just as a man’s wages cannot be estimated by the number of dollars he gets each week, but rather by the amount of the necessities of life that he can buy in return for the number of hours he has worked; so the price of fertilizer must be judged by the amount of plant food it contains, rather than by the money cost per ton. That is what makes high-grade fertilizer really cheaper than the low grades which cost less money. For example, take the most popular of the $25 a ton fertilizer, “2-8-2.” This contains 12 per cent. of plant food, or 240 pounds to the ton, made up as follows: two per cent. nitrogen, eight per cent. phosphoric acid, and two per cent. of potash. This brings the cost of this cheap fertilizer to 10½ cents per pound of plant food to the ton. Now if the farmer bought a ton of plain muriate of potash, it would cost him $50 per ton, but he would get 50 per cent. of plant food, thus making the actual cost only five cents per pound of plant food, less than half the plant food price of “2-8-2.”