Norwich Bulletin Newspaper, September 30, 1921, Page 9

LET THE BACTERIA DO IT (Written Specially for The Bulletin) I'm going to assume that you who do me the honor to read this are a practical working farmer. You want to raise crops that will pay you the cost of growing and leave some- thing over for your own wages and profit, To do this you have learned from experi- ence that you have got to manure your goil, i e. put back into it the necessary plent-food whieh previous crops have taken out. You know, perfectly well, that you can't keep on taking water out of & bucket unless, when it empties, you put_more water in. You know, just as well that you can't keep on taking crops off an acre forever, unless you put back into that acre the ‘fertility Which the growing crops absorb. To accomplish this you spread and plow under stable manure—all you have and all you can buy. But you never have enough of your own, do you? And you never can buy any to speak of, for your neighbor farmers want all they have for themselves. So you fall back on commercial fertflizers, the cost of which is so great that you simply can't afford enough to make up the deficit from the barnyard. There you are: Without sufficient farm manure for your needs and without money to buy commercial fertilizers to make up the lack. It may be added, parenthetically, that, at present farm prices for farm-grown produce, mighty few farmers can afford to spend money on any form of fertilizer. The cottom manufacturers says, very sensibly, that he wom't pay a dollar to make cotton cloth which he can’t sell for more than ] er vay o doliar i 1abor ana fertittzer | of bills to raise a crop which won't fetch more than fifty cents. You ean't get blood out of a turnip nor something out of nothing. Being in this eminently uncomfortable situation, between the devil and the deep sea, just what course are you going to steer? How are you going to feed your hungry soil when you can’t get farm manures emough and can’t afford high- priced commercial fertilizers? Well, why not let the bacteria do it? No, T'm not joking. Nor am I crasy. T'm jmst msking You a plain stmple, practical question. ‘Why—Not—Let—The —Bacteria— Do t? ‘Do what?” you ask, Why fertilize your sofl for yoi, 8o that you will need, to supplement their work, neither farm manures nor bankrupting carloads of complete fertilizer. I can imagine you shaking your heads 2nd wondering if John Farmer has him- self gone bughouse. Or else you pucker up your face into that sadly“unbecoming sneer which is so easy for you, and make “And you mean to say that bacteria were doing the rest?” That's precisely what 1 am trying to say. Let’s Took into the thing s little. What is it bacteria do in the soil? And how can they make fertllity? Well, they don’t “make fertility.” They simply render existing fertility avallable to the plants. “How d’ they do it?” Don't ask me. , any more than I know how, when I eat and swallow a beefsteak, my insides go at it and turn it into' blood and bone and muscle and fat and heat and energy and several other things which enable me to live and scientific” gentlemen talk learnedly about “metabolism” and other isms. You and I know that.our interior machinery,— which s entirely beyond.our own control some under-breath - remarik “another | —will maloe over that beefsteak into book theory."” blood and flesh and.bone, and enable us Tm not surprised that you should @0 to do our work. We're permitted to so. Just between you and me, please | take that comforting fact and don’t let the thing go any further—|leaving the “how" and the ‘why” for that's exactly what I did, myself, When | wiser philosophers to mull over. I first heard of it. .| Let's go back to the beginning—or as But while I'm not “from near it as we can get 2s cranky and angular end stiff-neck-| :ln a seventh-generation Yank as ev ‘When God made the alr he made It er 2 willing | of about four parts pure nitrogen and taieas tifeuimihiorrioe. i1 AN WREREL & CC et cxypen. Whetits, 8 18 eighiy to be shown” as any Missouran. per cent, nitrogen. The best nitrate of The very next day after this first hear- | soda {s only about iwenty per cent. ni. ing, it was my privilege to Walk over|trogen. And nitrogen is one of the ab- and across and around a three-acre fleld | sojute essentials for plant food. This whereon the bacteria were doing this| hag long been understood. Naturally, very thing. Doing it this year and have|men who knew it asked, “Why buy from been doing it for the past five years.|far-off Chil{ nitrate of soda which is only | Producing good, paying crops of fifteen | one-nfth nitrogen, when the air that is ' eighty-five cents. No more can the farm- or twenty different sorts without thé use|al} around us is four-fifths nitrogen? The answer was, at the time, fhat we | __ didn‘t know how to get the nitrogen out of the air cheaply enough to make it an ecomomical fertilzer, ‘Whereupon Messra. the Bacteria stuck | up thelr heads and remarked: “We'l! do it for you, and for nothing. That's our job.” It is now well known that certain plants of the sort called “legumes” by the learned —clover, alfalfa, peas, beans, | etc—have on thelr roots, under favor-| able circumstances, a great number of little knots or modules jnhabited by in- numerable nations of bacterla whose spe- | cial amusement it is to sift and winnow | the nitrogen out of tne air, work it over | ® and fill the soll with it in the very form most readily available for plants to live on. Right there, then, is the solutlon of the nitrogen problem, What's the use of | buying it when, if you'll only treat your | bacteria like a white man and give them | their fair chance, they'll pull it out of | ¥ the air for you, and not charge you a red cent for efther nitrogen or labor? | But, you'll say, nitrogen Is only one | of the three essential elements of plant | food. How about potash, for instance? | Go back to the beginming, again, if you please. When the safe great Cre- ator Who made the air mixed up the granite rocks which are the source o eoil in Eastern Comnecticut, He put them a very considerable amount of ash. Then He set His agents of rain| and frost and heat and erosion to work disintegrating and decomposing those | rocks. He drove His mile deep glaciers | across them, planing and scraping and | gridding, till the debris was made into| eofl—into sofl retas mind | the pure potash originaily contai the granite rocks of which it w In the granite-derived soils of Connecticut and other like regions, tests | show the existence of from fifteen to| thirty-five tons of potash per acre—pure | potash, mind you. | lAhxl.inC:(I;a question rises:. Why buy ! ¢ 3iad it = high-priced potash from Germany when of Frech Petaluma Eggs Arriving in Hartfcrsd, (ionn-, After Trans-con your own soil is chuck-full of it? . o e Ton: answer used (o be: Because that i tinental Trip at Exprzss Train Spee soll fen't in a form available to . pected that an!independence from a comparatively; became apparent. The details were|They can't get at it. There a8l - original investment. The average worked out with dispatch. The first 25 23 i 2400 hens, although there problem was the design of the ship- in Catifor with more than 10,030 hens| ping box. It was found that a corru- - westifa The largest producer|gated paper box provided the warm- L0 of them all has 50,000 chickens on 45! est, lightest and cheapest container.| coast, ar ore shocked byi 20 | In the beginning about 100 chicks \ve;‘e:‘ e ¢ gossip output : - : .| put together in a box. Dividing -the o i n colony. But ¢ o poultry men of Petaluma have| |, ;0o sour compartments with 25 € AT s i has been| chicks in each was later found a bet- | e of their craft. All men, it ‘*‘[ they | ter practice. Reducing the, compart- ex gha “‘“luw{."‘f‘hf,"fifif“‘t‘fl‘!‘: i lessened the danger of injury to mix 1 a telligence to do three things: write a | cks when tho BN wort DUk dbtiiniess their tremors extend to Pe- taluma P not far from S: eccle- clli- pro= more 1l remark names lik luma te- 000,000 uis- interest of bet- nd more abundant food 500,000,000 eggs a year. no earthquake eould find Pe- taluma ggs on hand for history randest omelette. Petaluma is located on an estuary of San Pablo Bay, about two hours by motor. or boat from the City f the G Gate, Settlers of more than a g n age discovered that s soil e are ideal for poul- try culit The m sunshine is tempered with light sea breezes, and the Tertile fields are made properly ab- | he rich, gravelly loam. tion produces a content- a hen whose thoughts are \ever clouded with the petty exaspera- tions which sometimes interfere with the serious business of laying eggs. In Petaluma and neightboring vii- Jages of Sonoma County the poultry industry represents an investment of more than $20,000,000. The aggregate county outp no less than 600,000,- 000 eggs annually. While a vast pro- portion of this output is absorbed by local hatcheries Petauma shipped last year more than 22,000,000 dozen eggs and 240,000 dozen poultry. The town styles itself “The World’s Egg Bas- ket”, which for truth and appropriate- nees gives all slogan makers a high mark to shoot at. The White Leghorn is the hero, or preferably, sthe heroine of Petaluma. Its vogue is a matter of sound busi- , ness principles. While its snowy plu- mage and gay red comb -and wattles would make it an ornamental feature in any rustic landscape, they are not elements of its popularity. Its record as a producer is the foundation of its fame. The White Leghorn lays annu- ally a maximum of eggs at a mimimum of cost. Their “air chamber” is small, which helps keep them fresh. More- over the eggs are large and white, and characterized by a fiavor more delicate than that of brown eggs, a ltrge pro- rovtion of which are imported from China. Their whiteness is a particular- 1y le asset in this illogical world where food, must gladden the eye as well as the palate. The chicken farms of Petaluma are of many sizes. As a rule the smalll one admits of -more intensive pro- duction than the large ones, and us- ually yields a higher profit per hen. One man with'ten acres of land and 3300-hens has a modern home, two- automobilés and an annual income of about. $6,000. There are thousands like ‘him who have gained o comfortable | play, rear a child and run a chicken| { farm, It is widely accepted that any-| {one, without reference to previous; training, experience or inclination, may | by spiration alone, achieve success| in these fields of endeavor. Whatever | may be said for cur childred and our plays, is known that the poultry| | notion is a popular fallacy. And there | is hardly a rural region in all the land | { that not point to the ruins of aj | chicken farm laid out in enthsusiasm | | by some rebel against the city’s dross| ionly to he abandoned later in despair. | Raising chickens in Petaluma is a| | highly specialized science. Success has | | been bought with persistence and the application of accrued experience. It| is true that some of the town's most| | representative men came to Petaluma | from office jobs, frequently broken ' |in heaith and lacking in capital. But they studied as they worked, and learn- | ed from their neighbors. Petaluma is| a friendly town where one can learn| from his neighbors. Most poultry men, like dairy men,; ! find it profitable to grow the feed for | ! their livestock. But it is different in! | Petaluma. As one Petaluman put it,| | “The man who raises chickens has no | | time for raising grain. He must do one or the other if he wants success.” The acres about Petaluma are fertile enough for any farming, but, speak- ing generally, it simply is not done. The true chicken specialist would no more be distracted by planting corn than an office manager would be an- noyed by manufacturing desks. It was in this atmosphere of speci- alization that a Petaluma pioneer dis- covered the hardy characteristics of newly hatched chicks. It does not seem reasonable to sup- pose that a day-old “fluff”’ can leave mother, incubator and all for a 72 hour parcel post trip with any hope of ar- riving at its destination in health and spirts. In fact when such a mad jour- ney was originally proposed some 25 years ago the suggetion provoked more merriment than did the blue prints for the first steam boat. But since that time the scoffers have been in- creasingly busy emtying their incuba- tors into mailing boxes, and recently the Pefaluma postoffice has been handling about 20,000 chicks a day. The poultry specialists learner that nature makes a strange provision for the welfare of baby chicks. Just' be- fore they break forth from their shels, they absorb the yolks of the eggs into their stomachs. Their of trademarked poultry food, this one | hearty meal bad to suffice until the j chick was" strong enough to scratch for fiself, | It was also observed that the ef i ;in which the chick developed vou‘lg qualify rather low as a fresh air pa-; vilifon, and from this fact it was de- duced that the chick could probably: travel during the early hours of its lifs ] in a ventllaled cardbourd box with-| out frequent eyo-openers fromi any ! oxygen bottle, these two dis- coveries together led to the preseni! tromendous traffic in newly hatched poultry. r As the possibilities for shipping them ‘well be notie in an acre as thirty tons, i it fsn't In shape to be used. A But that answer dldn't end the matter, ‘Wasn't there zny way to make it usabl For a long time none was discover Then Mt occurred to one deep-think! keen-reasoning man right in Eastern Connecticut to put this potesh conundrum up to the bacterla, {oo. H And they came right back with the | solution {n their mouths. He them white; he gave them all bow room they needed and enco them; he furnished thera somethin work within the form of ground 1 stone and raw rock phosphate, He “St'boy” to them and “sicked” them to do their best They did it. paper nor in theory, but in the a three-acre field, v drew out of the #oil and made available for plant food sometimes as much as three bLundred pounds of potash to the acre in a single yoar. Now this has been done right in Eastern Connecticut; has been done and 18 belng done. The place is in Storrs, up In Tolland oounty. The man who has done Prof. W. M. Esten of the Storrs cultural college. The ground on it has been done is a three acre fie an abandoned farm, which, five years s was covered with brambles and growing | up to bushes—hardly worth fencing for | pasture, Now it is producing crops suf- | ficlent to justify o valuation of several hundred dollars an acre, Have you nny fault to find with & yleld of 41 bushels per acre of Whoat? Or of 61 bushels per acro of | oats? Or of 113 bushels per acre of, flint corn? Or of 585 bushels per acre of Bouthport White Globe onlon 270 bushels per acre of potatoc of more than five and a hal clover nere? A been ralsed on that fleld is getting betier cvery year, wearing out. All rafsed, too, becmuse of the work done by the bacteria, assisted only by small additions of raw rock and raw ground limestone phate fs added because in phospherous; the quote. from Prof. it “makes~a hapy for the bacte the soil, helps t modules to you can raise go enou For Im loade In the meantime, 2 lace to get at from = ern_Connectici your own e convine Go THE e rather look. COLUMBIA ing during the The new fall tailored wear requires much of shoes : HIC, smart, trim—charming, indeed, are the new tailored suits and-coats. 3 And footwear must not sound a jarring note in these perfect street costumes. Shoes must “fmish” the silhouette with perfect taste, correct style. The Red Cross Shoe—made to fit the foot in action—is preeminently fitted to under- take this delicate task. For its lines conform to the foot in every movement and so it keeps its shapeliness, its daintiness. And always it gives utter comfort. Our selection of Red Cross Shoes, high or low, shows many models of tailored design for street wear. Quite correct, smart, and of distinctive style, they beautifully fill the requirements for this purpose. Come %n and try them on; match your new uilogd suit with shoes of perfect style. o EXCLUSIVE AGENCY Model Booterie 132 Main St., Norwich, Conn. nas been under | Another person stated that repalis maede 3 Hartford. |to the road last year which § wase of Coventry | stated cost $16.85 were the only®repatrs - in 50 s. It was also Columblia | that gravel and dirt to repair Parker | the road and to raise it above hign wa- s the | donated, alfp prob- ¥ e labor. : ! t aca- ¢ . X They| Hartford—Willle O. Burr, . ssary is to put| years an active member of th n that it will be| the Hartfo: es, and now the year which| Wednesday celebrated the apout $300 on handled. After the boxes had been veu- || tilated enough for 2 small chickens needs they were still found to be suf- ficiently tight for cold weather proteg- tion. Petaluma claims the honors for pro- ducing the first satistactory incubator | C. Byce began manufacturing them ere in 1879. His invention coupled with the discovery that baby chicks|® could be shipped led to the rise of| the hatcheries. One, hatchery turned out 974,214 chicks last year. There! are three more that can set a quarter of a million eggs at one time, The hatcheries operate throughout| the year. The mild fall and winter weather characteristic of California makes possible a continuous industry ! as producing eggs for the market. Con- | § equently very few poultry farmers in: the Petaluma district hatch their own chickens. They buy them from the| hatcheries just as the hatcieries secure their eggs from the poultry farmers. The care exercised by the hatcheries in selecting their eggs has done much to improve the industry They restrict their orders to the farms which are | B known to produce eggs of the highest| fertility and best quality. There is a | standard that all eggs must meet. It requires that every dozen shall weigh at least 22 ounces. The hatchery also investigates the breeding of the stock. Frequently it buys high-grade cock- erels and places them on the farms from which it if to purchase eggs. The existence of Petaluma is a fac- “tor in the commerce of California. The commission houses of San Francisco majntain branches there to buy the districts’ products. Some of the poul- try farmers ship direct to San Fran- cisco, to Bay City grocers, to buyers in distant cities and to the general market served by the Poultry Produc- ers of California. The Poultry Produc- ers organization has 1450 members, the | majority of them in Petaluma. Through ! its branch depositories eggs are can- dled, graded and prepared for ship- ment. As the fame of Petaluma’s industry began to spread throughout the eonn-‘ STARTLING much higher figure. To capitalize this demand the enter- prising poultry men arranged with the Very little of course, are darker than 50 SPORT HATS . _ A special lof of clever Two railroads ana a steamship line serve its fransportation needs.® Fine homes parks, well paved streeis mod- ey gcools, churches and libraries pro- ihe eivie bacsground, With its sailiions in bank reseurees it i sald 19 be ine yichesi ety of 6000 population in the wiole country, A MONTH-END SPECIAL Novelty Autumn Sailor Hats $3. Rolling and Flat Brim Sailors of Newest Shape charming sailors, these, made of Hatier's Plush, in black and all the better fail colorings, which, want a suappy hat for sport wear, here it is. 23 ai . .S SALE PRICE ¢ in bk d, navy, g . msmwt}fl;:,m ack, red, nav: BARGAINS FOR TND ' THE MONTH SHOPPERS One Reel of Coats $45.00 They’ve just been received, too. All % A‘new 1ot of the ever-popular Bram- new models, many of them being trimmed with fur, and all made of the most desirable fabrics. coats were actually made to sefl at a “B o) € o ors. proven so figures. | $15.00. These 98 e e ) those of Summer. If you o = 3 mley” Dresses 95 | $25.00: Values up to $5000 . " £ ley Dresses, in zil of the wanted col- There is no dress which has ractive for youthful They have been selling for T ~ TSI RN AL DL e ERHIISFITINGY i OneReel of Dresses e | Silk Dresses, and Wool Dresses, them clever in design, and’in fabrifs ber is strictly limited to those dressés upon the reel, and we ndviletelli choice. v £ END O’ THE MONTH VALUES IN THE MEN’S SHOP NTERESTING ECONOMIES FOR THE MAN JRCERIZED LISLB — Good, sturdy socks, in lade with re- - = - - s = - = FRUIT OF THE LOOM NIG} SHIRTS—Made of genuinesF: of the Loom Cotton. Allislzg§. Value $1.75— - SALE PRICE $129 = WOVEN MADRAS SHIRTS &/ Good quality, and all colors guage ed foot— SALE PRICE 25¢ THREAD SILK SOCKS— full-fashioned, and re- v sold for $1.50 a pair. We | ,teed. Sizes 14 to 17. ¢ t ,";‘é{,cE“g"‘Dg"““‘ cently sold as high as $2.50— & | o - SALE PRICE §$129 = RIBEED UNION = ' ng needles. | $1.50 SILK FOUR-IN- i Heavy, rich, lustrous silks, in latest shapes and patterns— SALE PRICE &9 t, well made in every particular— SALE PRICE $149