should be allowed to run over the whole of the land by day, and be
folded there every night--about one pound of cotton-seed cake per head
being allowed daily. By this means, as the fold would be moved every
day, the amount of manure deposited on the soil could be estimated.

If there were a hundred sheep, receiving one pound of decorticated
cotton-seed cake per head, daily, and the hurdles were arranged to
enclose a space of twenty-five by twenty yards, in the course of ten
days an acre of land would have received manure from one thousand pounds
of cake; which amount would supply seventy-seven pounds of nitrogen,
sixty-eight pounds of phosphate of lime, and thirty-two pounds of
potash. This amount of cake would cost about sixteen dollars.

As regards the value of the cake as a food, it is somewhat difficult to
form an estimate; but it takes nine or ten pounds of dry food--say
roots, cake, and hay--to produce an increase of one pound of live weight
in sheep. The cake has certainly a higher feeding value, than either hay
or roots, but I will here give it only the same value, and consider that
one hundred and ten pounds of increase of the animal was obtained by the
consumption of the one thousand pounds of cake. The value of the
increase of the live weight would be in England fully eleven dollars,
leaving five dollars as the cost of the manure. Now the cake furnished
seventy-seven pounds of nitrogen alone, which, if purchased in an
artificial manure, would have cost nineteen dollars; and the other
substances supplied by the cake, would have cost from four to five
dollars more. The manures required, therefore, would be obtained much
more cheaply by this than by any other process.

Labor would be saved by not cultivating the land. Manure would be saved
by substituting vegetation which grows under or above ground, almost all
the year round. And, by feeding the stock with cake, the necessary
fertility would be obtained at the lowest possible cost.

It is probable that the land would require this treatment to be repeated
for several years, before there would be a fair growth of grass. The
land might then be broken up and one grain crop be taken, then it might
again be laid down to grass.

Hitherto, I have considered a case where fertility is almost absent from
the land, this, however, is an exception, as agriculture generally is
carried on upon soils which contain large stores of fertility, though
they may be very unequally