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N.-MENHADEN AND OTHER FISH AND THEIR PRODUCTS AS RELATED TO AGRICULTURE.

BY W. O. ATWATER.

Introductory note.

267. Mr. Goode has placed in my hands a number of documents, manuscripts, and letters concerning the use of fish, and particularly menhaden, as fertilizers, with a request for a statement of the more important facts and principles that have to do with the application of these materials to the improvement of agriculture.

The time allowed for this work is, unfortunately, so short as to forbid anything more than a hasty putting together of the data immediately at hand, in the form of a brief review of the history and a still more incomplete outline of the results of scientific investigation and practical experience concerning the preparation, properties, and uses of fish as a fertilizer and as food for stock. I hope that this may serve to explain the chief practical bearings of the subject, to show its importance, and lead to its more thorough investigation hereafter.

The employment of fish products in agriculture offers a singularly forcible illustration of the slowness with which the worth of some of the most valuable materials is recognized, and of the need of scientific investigation and experiment to aid practical skill in utilizing them most profitably.

The loss to the agriculture of our country at large, and particularly our sea-board States, from the waste of fish that might be utilized, the wrong manufacture of the materials that are saved, the export of the best products to Europe, the uneconomical use as fertilizers of what we save and keep at home, and from the almost entire neglect to devote the products to their most profitable purpose, feeding stock and enriching the manure of the farm, if it were capable of accurate estimate, could not fall short of some millions of dollars annually. This is due mainly to the fact that the principles that underlie the right economizing of fish are not generally understood, and, for that matter, are not yet fully learned. It is only lately that science has joined with prac tice in studying and improving the manufacture and use of fish products for agricultural purposes. The best work in investigation has been done in Europe; its results come to us but tardily. Manufacturers hesitate to apply and farmers are still slower to use them. Everything that brings new knowledge or extends the understanding of what is known must, then, be most valuable.

47. MENHADEN AND OTHER FISH IN A FRESH STATE USED AS A FER. TILIZER.

Use among the Indians and early colonists.

268. Professor Trumbull tells us that the Indian names of Brevoortia, "menhaden" and "poghaden" (pogy), mean "fertilizer," that which manures, and that the Indians were accustomed to employ this species, with others of the herring tribe (aumsûog and munnawhateaûg), mostly the alewife (Pomolobus pseudoharengus), in enriching their corn-fields. Thomas Morton wrote in 1632, of Virginia: "There is a fish (by some called shadds, by some allizes) that at the spring of the yeare passe up the rivers to spawn in the ponds, & are taken in such multitudes in every river that hath a pond at the end that the inhabitants doung their grounds with them. You may see in one township a hundred acres together, set with these fish, every acre taking 1,000 of them, & an acre thus dressed will produce and yeald so much corne as 3 acres without fish; & (least any Virginea man would inferre hereupon that the ground of New England is barren, because they use no fish in setting their corne, I desire them to be remembered, the cause is plaine in Virginea) they have it not to sett. But this practice is onely for the Indian maize (which must be set by hands), not for English grain : & this is, therefore, a commodity there.” *

This passage is very interesting, showing the use of fish fertilizers in Virginia two hundred and fifty years ago or more, and, from what is known of the habits of the herring family in Virginia rivers and the persistency of local names, there can be little doubt that many menhaden were used among the fertilizing fish, though "shadds and allizes" doubtless includes the shad (Alosa sapidissima), the mattowocca (Pomolobus mediocris), the alewife (Pomolobus pseudoharengus), and the threadherring (Dorosoma cepedianum), all of which are common in spring in the Potomac and other rivers which empty into Chesapeake Bay.

In Governor Bradford's "History of Plimoth Plantation" an account is given of the early agricultural experiences of the Plymouth colonists. In April, 1621, at the close of the first long dreary winter, "they (as many as were able) began to plant their corne, in which service Squanto (an Indian) stood them in great stead, showing them both y manner how to set it and after how to dress & tend it. Also he tould them, axcepte they got fish & set with it (in these old grounds) it would come to nothing; and he showed them yt in ye midle of Aprill, they should have store enough come up ye brooke by which they begane to build, and taught them how to take it."t

*New England Canaan; or New Canaan, containing an abstract of New England. Composed in three Bookes. Written by Thomas, of Clifford's Inn, Gent. Upon ten Yeers knowledge & Experiment of the Country. Printed by Charles Green, 1632. Force's Historical Tracts, Vol. II, .?

+ Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., III, 4th series, 1856, p. 100.

An allusion to the practice of the Indians in this respect may be found in George Mourt's "Relation or Journal of the beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation settled at Plimoth, in New England, by certain English Adventurers both Merchants and others." "London, 1622": "We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and peas, and, according to the manner of Indians, we manured our ground with herrings, or rather shads, which we have in great abundance and take with great ease at our doors. Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good.”*

Again, in Edward Johnson's "Wonder working Providence of Sion's Saviour in New England, Being a Relation of the firste planting in New England in the yeere 1628, London, 1654," written in 1652, the author says: "But the Lord is pleased to provide for them [the colonists] great store of fish in the spring-time, especially alewives, about the bignesse of a herring. Many thousands of these they used to put under their Indian corne, which they plant in Hills five foot asunder; and assuredly when the Lord created this corne, hee had a speciall eye to supply these his peoples wants with it, for ordinarily five or six graius doth produce six hundred."t

Use at the beginning of the present century and later.

269. Menhaden do not appear to have been much used by agricultur ists of Cape Cod in the beginning of this century, though the old record shows that the horse-shoe crab and sea-weed were extensively applied.

In 1792 the Hon. Ezra L'Hommedieu, of New York, published a paper in the New York Agricultural Transactions which gives somewhat more accurate data and directions concerning the use of fish as a fertilizer. He says: "Experiments made by using the fish called menhaden or mosbankers as a manure have succeeded beyond all expectation. In dunging corn in the holes, put two in

a hill on any kind of soil where corn will grow, and you will have a good crop." He recommends them as a top-dressing for grass. "Put them on a piece of poor loamy land, at the distance of fifteen inches from each other, * * * and by their putrefaction they so enrich the land that you may mow about two tons per acre." But he adds, very wisely, "how long this manure will last has not yet been determined." He gives, in his quaintly interesting way, an account of "an experiment made the last summer by one of my near neighbors, Mr. Tuthill, in raising vegetables with this fish manure," which is worth citing as an illustration of the curious combinations of truth and error, which, in their lack of definite knowledge of the laws of plant-growth and the action of manures, the theorizers of that time invented.

Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., 2d series, IX, 1832, p. 60. + Coll. Mass. Hist. Soc., 2d series, III, 1816, 158. See Appendix 0.

“About the first of June he [Mr. Tuthill] carted near half an ox-cart load of those fish on twenty feet square of poor, light land, being loam mixed with sand. The fish he spread as equally as he could by throwing them out of the cart; being exposed to the weather, they were soon consumed. He then raked off the bones, to prevent their hurting the feet of the children who might go into the garden, and ploughed up the piece and planted it with cucumbers and a few cabbages. The season was extremely dry, and but few cucumbers grew in the neighborhood except what grew on this small piece, and here the production exceeded anything that had before been known. By his own computation and that of his neighbors, this twenty feet square of ground produced more than forty bushels of cucumbers, besides some fine cabbages. I measured the ground myself, and have no doubt of the quantity adjudged to have grown on the same."

Mr. L'Hommedieu's theoretical explanation of this is clear and simple. The fish "enrich the land by their putrefaction." When this process has ceased he questions whether much more good can be expected from them, and doubts if they will make a lasting manure; nor does he find any fault with his neighbor for raking away the bones instead. of covering them with earth to prevent their pricking his children's bare feet. In the decomposition a good deal of "effluvia" is evolved, which is evidently absorbed by the leaves of the plants, and contributes to their growth. But "by putting these fish on the land for manure, exposed to the air until they are consumed, there can be no doubt that a considerable part of the manure is lost by the effluvia which passes off the putrefied substance, as is evident from the next experiment." This was made by "Mr. Joseph Glover, a farmer in Suffolk County," who had evidently learned the art of composting fish with earth, and practiced it in a way which some farmers nowadays might improve their ways by imitating.

66 He first carts earth and makes a bed of such circumference as will admit of being nine inches thick; he then puts on one load of fish, then covers this load with four loads of common earth, but if he can get rich dirt he covers it with six loads, and in that manner makes of fish and earth a heap of about thirty loads. The whole mass soon becomes impregnated and turns black. By experience he finds that fifteen ex-cart loads of this manure is a sufficient dressing for one acre of his poor land, which produces him thirty bushels of the best wheat by the acre."

Now it happened that Mr. Glover made a heap of fish and earth "in the manner above related near a fence where a field of wheat was growing on the opposite side. The wheat near the heap soon changed its colour, grew luxuriant, and at harvest yielded near double the quantity to the other parts of the field." The improvement in the wheat near the heap, Mr. L'Hommedieu thinks, must be due to the "effluvia arising from the putrefaction of the fish and absorbed by the leaves of the wheat."

President Dwight, of Yale College, visiting Eastern Long Island in 1804, speaks with much approval of the menhaden as a fertilizer, and thus describes the introduction of its use:

"Their agriculture has, within a few years, been greatly improved. For a considerable period before the date of this journey the land had become generally impoverished by a careless husbandry, in which the soil was only exhausted, aud no attempts were made to renew its strength. * Within this period the inhabitants, with a laudable spirit of enterprise, have set themselves to collect manure wherever it could be found. Not content with what they could make and find on their own farms and shores, they have sent their vessels up the Hudson and loaded them with the residuum of potash manufactories, gleaned the streets of New York, and have imported various kinds of manure from New Haven, New London, and even from Hartford. In addition to all this, they have swept the Sound, and covered their fields with the immense shoals of white-fish with which, in the beginning of summer, its waters are replenished. No manure is so cheap as this, where the fish abound; none is so rich, and few are so lasting. Its effects on vegetation are prodigious. Lands which heretofore have scarcely yielded ten bushels of wheat by the acre, are said, when dressed with white-fish, to have yielded forty. The number caught is almost incredible. It is here said, and that by persons of very fair reputation, that 150,000 have been taken at a single draught. Such, upon the whole, have been their numbers, and such the ease with which they have been obtained, that lands in the neighborhood of productive fisheries are declared to have risen, within a few years, to three, four, and, in some cases, to six times their former value."*

Elsewhere he speaks with equal favor of its use in Connecticut, remarking that it is remarkably favorable to vegetation of every kind, which is the object either of agriculture or horticulture:

"Within the last twenty years the inhabitants of this [Branford] and other townships along the coast have employed for the purposes of manure the white-fish, a species of herring remarkably fat and so full of bones that it cannot conveniently be eaten. In the months of June and July these fish frequent the Sound in shoals, and are caught with seines in immense multitudes. Ten thousand are considered as a rich dressing for an acre. No manure fertilizes ground in an equal degree; and none seems more universally favorable to the productions of the climate. Wheat, particularly, grows under its influence in the most prolific manner, and is peculiarly safe from blasting.

"The following is a strong instance of the fertility of land manured with white-fish: Mr. David Dibble, of Killingworth, from 5 acres of land dressed with this manure, had in the year 1812, 2444 bushels of rye,

* Dwight's Travels, III, 1822, p. 305. Journey to Long Island, 1804, Letter II.

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