to have, and I'd like to know what's wrong with it."

Again a shadow seemed to cross the sweet face as the mother's glance
turned from grandma to Adelaide.

"The system has some merit," replied Percy, "but it starts at the
wrong point in the circle. Cattle and sheep must first have feed
before they can produce the fertilizer with which to enrich the
soil; and people who would raise stock on poor land should always
produce a good supply of food before they procure the stock
requiring to be fed. There is probably no more direct route to
financial disaster than for one to insist upon over-stocking a farm
that is essentially worn out."

"But doesn't pasturing enrich the soil?" asked the grandmother.

"Pasturing may enrich the soil only in a single element of plant
food," said Percy. "In all other elements simple pasturing must
always contribute toward soil depletion. If the pasture herbage
contains a sufficient proportion of legume plants so that the
fixation of free nitrogen exceeds the utilization of nitrogen in
animal growth, then the soil will be enriched in that element,
although with the same growth of plants it would be enriched more
rapidly without pasturing; for animals are not made out of nothing.
Meat, milk, and wool are all highly nitrogenous products.

"On the other hand no amount of pasturing can add to the soil a
single pound of any one of the six mineral elements, and phosphorus,
which is normally the most limited of all these elements, is
abstracted from the soil and retained by the animals in very