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Show FARiV!lHQ C.4 THE GROUND FLOOR I Suppose you were starvi-rr on the j second floor of a honse l.i'e there Wjs ' aTentifal supply of foo l on theground floor. Would you not welcome thi-kincly thi-kincly soul who should put a key into, the locked door tn-U lead i the stairs? Such a favor are our most progressive fdnners doin to their starving crops. They prow, perhaps, in too shallow soilf buc far beneath, in one of the lower stories of the earth's crust, is plenty of rich- mineral food for the.n. The key that unlocks the door to ii is dynamite. An expUsion oreaks up the hard-pan, loosjns the soil far below t ie possibility j of any plow or cultivator to ilis ri. ute i it, and open3 to the plant the s ore of food that it needs. Says X--no W. Put-n.iir, Put-n.iir, in an article on "Farmiiiij with Dynamite," contributed to Cassier's Monthly (New York, August): "Between the available farming soil j Mother of Eighteen Children "'I am the mother of eighteen children and have tbe praise of doing more work than any young woman in my town," writes Mrs. C. J. Martin, Boone Miil, Va. "I suffered for five years with stomach trouble and .ould not eat as much as a biscuit without suffering. I have taken three bottles of Chamberlain's Chamber-lain's Tablets and am now a well woman and weigh 26S pound.-'. I ctn eat anything any-thing I want to, and as much as I want and feel better than I have at any time in ten years. I refer to anyone in Boone Mili or vicinity and they will vouch for what I say." Chamberlain, s Tablets are for sale by all dealers, (adv) above and the underlying mineral wealth below there is as definiie a boundary ! wall against the intrusion of root growth : a there is against the farmer's cattle ; i i th- wire fence which shuts them j from the lands of his neighbors. : "How to tap these rub. mineral veins has been the problem. If the crust is 1 not too hard certain plants solve it for themselves, though only in part for their weaker neighbors. Some of the clovers, the cow-horn turnip, the mang- ; el and a few others, if a thrifty surface . growth is given them, attack this crust ' with their tap roots with surprising energy. In many places, .however, even these are repulsed; while the feebler root growths of the smaller grains try to adapt themselves to the conditions which they can not overcome and send, their hungry feeders in stunted stunt-ed coiN through the su face soil that has already been drained of its plant food. Deeper plowing has been ' suggested sug-gested and tried. It takes more power ahead of the plow; in other words, it increases the cost of production, the cost of the world's food; then it introduces intro-duces certain new evils which require extra plant energy or operating skill to overcome. Subsoiling is even more ex- ; pensive and is only playfully effective; I it scratches a few grooves into the out- side varnish of the earth, but does not reallv open up the mineral mines below. "The world jested while the first stick of dynamite was being lowered into in-to the midst of this condition and the explosion came before she got through 1 tughing; then she looked in astonish-mei-t in 10 the resulting hole. The walls were shattered and seamed with little j crevices running in every direction and ; the plant growth which was tried fol- i lowed along these tiny openings until j in contact with a supply of every min-; min-; eral element required. The surface-j surface-j water, too, instead of dashing off to the j nearest creek or saturating the thin j surface-soil to a mortar-bed, gradually : trickled dovvn these deep well passages ' and lay tr:ere ready for the emergency of drought, but beyo .d the danger-lino of the hitherto drowning rootlets. The ' plant growth showed an astonishing ap-iprecialion ap-iprecialion of all this. It pushed the nttie rootlets into the crevices, where f they expanded rapidly in their rich feeding, and penetrated a surprising depth, seemingly from a sheer love of ex ploration. These new feeding-grounds these intertwining channels into which the stir fa co-water drained with its load of w.trm air, hid virtually opeiei up a npw firm empire. The world had buikied a second story to its agricultural agricul-tural factory. " What does this gold-mine, this source of inexhaustible wealth which lies just below our worn- out farming lands, a-mount a-mount to when we sum it up? What are some of the dividends, and may we all expect our share? Mr. Putna n asks these questions, and answers hjm by quoting a few facts. He writes: "Perhaps the most fam us orchardist in the E tst, if not in the United States, used alternating dynamite and half-dug i hole3 a few years ago in setting out an j orchard of young peach trees. Three j years from then i.he trees set by this new plan bote from three to six bushels"! of fruit each, while those that 'were j hand-set, unuer t -.e influence of a broil- j ing sun, dried up and showed no signs of fruit. This was in Conneclicut. In South Carolina, land tnat had been dyn- : amited raised c!3 per cent more corn in a single season than the same ground produced before. A farm in Kansas that was underlaid by a zone of hard ' subsoil and would have been considered dear at 510 per a-re if valued by the growth it would produce, after being broken up wifh dynamite at a depth of four or five feet now contains a 100-acre 1 field of as fine alfalfa as grows in the State and annually produces from $30 to $35 per acre. Fifteen thousand dollars dol-lars has been refused for this 160 acre farm. On another Kansas farm was a 40 acre swamp that could not be drained in the usual way. In ' some of it the . water was three feet deep. It was tap- ' ped by means of a row of blast-holes, and the next day the owner walked a-cross a-cross the tract. A year from then that field produced 1,600 bushels of oats and ; is now in fine alfalfa. A Georgia orch-ardist orch-ardist found by experimenting that by ! planting peach trees in dynamided holes he gained two years in six. . . . . These are some of the results; there are thousands similar. Thousands of acres, prev;ous:y unproductive, that are now teening with fertility; thousands of practical experimenters who can afford to laugh, who are actually ' laughing because somebody once said 'dynamite' to them and said it .with a fervor that' con-' vinced." Literary Digest. |