farming, the great desideratum was to make a soil rich in plant food, that could be called upon to grow any crop suitable to the climate; of late years, in this country, the tendency has been to fertilize especially for the crop under cultivation. One system is fertilizing the land, the other is fertilizing the crop. With tobacco, and in fact with all market garden crops, fertilizing the soil is the method to be followed, except that for tobacco an excess of phosphoric acid is unnecessary, and also that special care must be taken to exclude all compounds of chlorine.

This system of stocking the land with an excess of manurial matter is the more essential for tobacco, because lands are very differently affected by the fertilizing elements. Some lands have a great power of fixing and retaining potash in an almost insoluble form; others have a strong affinity for lime; and much difference is noticed in the ease with which the nitrogen supply is developed for the use of the growing crop. The only safe rule is to give a superabundance of all forms of plant food that are required. More care is necessary in the selection of manurial supply for tobacco than for any other crop, because it is a remarkably delicate plant, and the texture and burning qualities of the leaf are largely influenced by the materials upon which it feeds.

Another reason why tobacco and many other quickgrowing crops require much larger stores of plant food in the soil than is found in the chemical analyses of the product, is because the roots of the crop cannot occupy every portion of the soil, especially in the early stages of growth. The demand made on the soil, or on fertilizers, by the tobacco crop, is greater than that made by any other crops which receive as much of nearly every kind of plant food. Hay is almost as exhaustive as tobacco, measured in total extract from the soil, but grass grows the whole year throughout, save when the

ground is frozen or covered with snow, or for more than eight months. It is true, the period of active growth required to mature a hay crop begins in spring, and is finished in three months; but during the year previous, for at least five months, the grass roots are storing up food in their root stocks, or bulbs, for the more rapid aftergrowth. Tobacco, on the other hand, cannot be set out in the field before summer is begun, and it should be in the shed in about three months. Thus, its growth must be a very rapid one, and the supplies of food in the soil must be very abundant, so that the rapidly extending roots may be met at every point with their necessary pabulum. An acre of first-rate grass land yields, as the result of eight months' growth, two to three tons of crop, while the tobacco land must yield that weight in three months.

The real disparity, however, is much greater. The principal growth of tobacco is accomplished in the hottest summer weather and in a period of some forty or sixty days. Very heavy fertilizing is, therefore, necessary, to provide for its nourishment, and the more so because the best tobacco lands are light in texture and may suffer from loss by drainage, evaporation or decomposition, to say nothing of drouth.

TOBACCO DOES NOT EXHAUST THE SOIL.

One of the most important truths established by the application of science to tobacco, is the annihilation of the old idea that this crop exhausts the soil to an extraordinary degree. It is true that tobacco requires plenty of food in the soil, as we have just pointed out. But if this is obtained by growing the crop on virgin soil, and by not returning to the land what the crop takes from it, then tobacco does exhaust the soil; so will any staple crop under the same treatment. This was the method long followed, especially in the South,

to clear up new land, as old fields became barren from constant cropping without manures or fertilizers. Cocke declared against tobacco years ago, because "its culture had exhausted whole counties in Virginia, from the Atlantic to the head of tide waters," but the same exhaustion is found in sections where tobacco was never grown.

In both instances, soil poverty was due to soil depletion-constant taking away of crops and not putting back what they removed from the soil. Low in prices as lands were, it was found much easier and cheaper to occupy fresh soils than reclaim exhausted ones. Complaint is now made in the White Burley districts of Kentucky and Ohio, that the soil is becoming rapidly exhausted under tobacco culture, even where manuring is practiced. This is easily accounted for. The surface of the country is rolling, or extremely broken, and when planted in a crop that requires clean cultivation, vast quantities of the surface soil are swept into the valleys with every rain that falls, gullies form rapidly, and the earth becomes scarified with gaping, ugly wounds, down which flows the very lifeblood of the soil. The remedy for this waste is rotation with grasses, clover, alfalfa and grain crops, to bind the soil.

The truth is, no crop is exhaustive if it is properly fertilized; all that is required is to supply an abundance of every element that the plant needs, and of the right quality and condition; for if this is not done, the latent resources of the soil are drawn upon to supply the deficiency, and the soil is impoverished just so far as it is drained of any element essential to plant growth. Furthermore, the subject of the exhaustion of the soil by tobacco should be considered from two standpoints: First, what is actually removed from the soil by the sale of the crop; second, what is required in the soil to produce the crop. And a casual view of the subject would

fail to find an intimate connection between the two, as is explained below.

What Tobacco Takes From the Soil.-This has been very carefully determined by Johnson for Connecticutgrown seedleaf, and by Davidson for Virginia-grown tobaccos, as appears in the subjoined table. The seedleaf crop mentioned was grown from 8000 plants on one acre, yielding an average of 1875 pounds of pole-cured leaves (or 1400 pounds of water-free leaf), and 3200 pounds of pole-cured stalks (or about 1300 pounds of water-free stalks). Davidson's average of analyses of Bradley broadleaf, Goldfinder, White Burley and Yellow Orinoco, shows a fair crop of Virginia tobaccos to be 1000 pounds per acre of barn-cured leaf (or 928 pounds of water-free leaf), and 353 pounds of cured stalks (or 334 pounds of water-free stalks):

Table I.-POUNDS OF PLANT FOOD REMOVED FROM THE SOIL BY THE TOBACCO CROP GROWN ON ONE ACRE.

The Connecticut crop of 1875 pounds of cured leaf takes relatively large quantities of nitrogen (100 pounds), potash (140 pounds) and lime (100 pounds), and very little phosphoric acid (16 pounds). The Virginia leaf also draws heavily on these elements, and a crop of Virginia tobacco yielding the same weight (1875 pounds of leaf) contains, of nitrogen 98 pounds, potash 120 pounds,

lime 99 pounds, and phosphoric acid 13 pounds, in the leaf and stalk.

It also appears that the stalks in such an acre of Connecticut tobacco weigh, at the time of cutting, about 9500 pounds, of which about 8300 pounds is water. Two-thirds of this is evaporated in curing, and the rest is carried back to the field in the cured stalks. The later the crop is cut, the more nitrogen and mineral elements it contains; stalks cut on August 22 contained 26 pounds of nitrogen per acre, which increased to 42 pounds when not cut until September 7. Like gains occur in Virginia and other types of tobacco. No determination is at hand of the amount of plant food in the roots of such a Connecticut crop as that above named, but the Virginia crop of 1000 pounds leaf per acre contains in its roots, of nitrogen eight pounds, potash seven and one-half pounds, lime five and one-half pounds, phosphoric acid and magnesia, one pound each. Whatever plant food the roots contain, of course, remains in the soil, and it is not necessary to consider it after the first season, but on new land, sufficient plant food must be present to develop the roots freely, in addition to the other parts of the plant. In any rational system of tobacco culture, the stalks are always returned to the soil as fertilizer; hence the only fertility really lost is that sold in the leaf.

But since the entire plant must be fed, the necessity of large quantities of plant food is at once apparent, for everything essential to the perfect development of every part of the plant must be present in the soil in a thoroughly available condition. The demands of tobacco can be better appreciated by comparing it with other leading field crops. And since cigar leaf is grown under the highest state of cultivation and with a lavish supply of fertility, it is only fair to use for comparison other crops grown under similar favorable conditions. Prof. John