to maintain the temperature below that of the body. After the compost stacks have been completed they are permitted to stand five weeks in summer, seven weeks in winter, when they are forked over and transferred to the opposite side of the house.
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Fig. 117. — Exterior view of compost house at Nara Experiment Station.
If we state in round numbers the total nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium thus far enumerated which Japanese
farmers apply or return annually to their twenty or
twenty-one thousand square miles of cultivated fields, the
case stands 385,214 tons of nitrogen, 91,656 tons of
phosphorus and 255,778 tons of potassium. These values are
only approximations and do not include the large volume
and variety of fertilizers prepared from fish, which have
long been used. Neither do they include the very large
amount of nitrogen derived directly from the atmosphere
through their long, extensive and persistent cultivation of
soy beans and other legumes. Indeed, from 1903 to 1906
the average area of paddy field upon which was grown a
second crop of green manure in the form of some legume
was 6.8 per cent of the total area of such fields
aggregating 11,000 square miles. In 1906 over 18 per cent of
the upland fields also produced some leguminous crop,
