Excerpt from Second Report of the Geological Survey in Kentucky, Made During the Years 1856 and 1857

On stock-farms, where young animals are reared and sold, when they come to maturity, also on dairy-farms, where milk, butter, and cheese are prepared for market, there is necessarily a great drain upon the soil, principally in phosphate of lime or bone-earth. It has been estimated that there is removed one thousand pounds of this bone. Earth in the shape of veal, butter, and cheese derived from twenty cows, pastured during one summer on a farm. Chiefly by this means, and by the successive crops of wheat exported from the Genesee and Mo hawk vallies, the average crop of wheat has been reduced from thirty five to forty bushels to twelve and a half bushels per acre, and this reduction has been proved to be, in most cases, due to the removal of phosphoric acid from the soil.

Sandy soils are greatly improved by the application of absorbents, such as muck, humus, vegetable mould, charcoal, coal-dust, and clay, because pure sand has comparatively a small absorbent power, and allows what ammonia and nitrates may have been brought down by rains to evaporate again into the atmosphere, or filter through it.

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