Alva Agee

“ Our best success comes only when we work with her. When a soil has been robbed by man, and has been abandoned on account of inability to produce a profitable crop, the first thing nature does is to produce a growth of weeds, bushes, briers, or aught else of which the soil chances to have the seeds. It is nature's effort to restore some organic matter—some humus-making material—to the nearly helpless land. Vegetable matter, rotting on and in the soil, is the life-giving principle. It unlocks a bit of the great store of inert mineral plant-food during its growth and its decay. ”

“ The practical man uses a great number of technical terms in his own field of labor, and often fails to recognize the fact that they are technical, and may be puzzling to many other people. He uses such terms for the sake of accuracy, desiring to express to his fellow-workmen exactly what he means. The farmer, stockman, carpenter, banker—all have command of such terms, and need them, but the chemist who, in a way, must come even nearer to accuracy in expression, finds that many people who want his assistance do not care to master and use any of his terms. ”

“ We are naturally so lacking in judicial [Pg 48] temper that opinion has swung violently from favor to disfavor. As most soils need organic matter, we seize upon the thought that anything evidently inclined to use it up is an evil. The purpose of tillage is in no small degree to bring about disintegration and resulting exhaustion of vegetable matter. The latter is a storehouse of plant food, and some of it is needed to feed the crop desired. Tillage is no more to be commended for this purpose than a quantity of lime equivalent in power to do the needed work. ”

“ Tillage.—Man's ability to assist nature in the work of production finds a notable illustration in the matter of tillage. Its purpose is to provide right physical condition of the soil for the particular class of plants that should be produced, while destroying the competition of other plants that are for the time only weeds. Most soils become too compact when left unstirred. The air cannot enter freely, plant-roots cannot extend in every direction for food, the water from rains cannot enter easily, there is escape of the moisture in the ground, and weathering of the soil proceeds too slowly. ”

“ Land never does its best when skimped in any way. As we raise the percentage of carbonate of lime in land that naturally is deficient, we give increasing ability to such land to take on some of the desirable characteristics of a limestone soil. It is poor business to be making a hand-to-mouth fight against a state of actual acidity unless the cost of more liberal treatment is prohibitive. The most satisfactory liming is done where the expense is light enough to justify the free use of material. When this is the case, extreme fineness of all the stone is undesirable. ”

“ If it is necessary to plant a field that is deficient in fertility, expending labor and money for tillage and seed, the only rational course is to furnish all needed plant-food for a good yield. There may be little net profit from the one crop, but there will be more than could be obtained without the liberal fertilization, and the soil will be better equipped for another crop. This applies, in a notable degree, to fertilization of a wheat crop with which timothy and clover will be seeded. ”

“ Nature made the value of land as a producer of food utterly dependent upon the activity of lime, and at the same time gave it some power to shirk its work. In a normal soil is a percentage of lime that came from the disintegration of rock of the region or was transported by action of water on a huge scale. Possibly rarely would it be in insufficient amount to keep a soil in a condition friendly to plant life, and to feed the plant, if it stayed where nature placed it and kept in form available for the needs it was intended to meet. ”

“ Fertilizers.—When a crop is fed to livestock, and all the manure is returned to the land that produced the crop without loss by leaching or fermentation, there is a return to the land of four fifths of the fertility, and a good form of organic matter is supplied. A portion of the crops cannot be fed upon the farm, or otherwise the human race would have only animal products for food. The welfare of the people demands that a vast amount of the soil's crops be sold from the farms producing them. ”

“ Formerly, acidity was associated in our minds with wet, low-lying land, but within the last twenty years we have learned that it prevails in light seashore sands along the Atlantic shore, in clays, loams and shales stretching to the Appalachian system of mountains, on top of mountain ranges and across foothills to our central states, and through them in stretches to the semi-arid lands of the west. While not all this land has fallen into the lime-deficient class, and the great part of some states remains alkaline, the tendency toward acidity is continuous. ”

“ It is rather idle to say that the annual product of a horse in the form of manure is $30, or more or less, even when an analysis shows that the nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash contained in it are worth that sum when valued at the market prices of those plant constituents. If the total amount of fertility found in the voidings of all the animals of the farm were provided in a pile of commercial fertilizer containing the same amount of each plant constituent, its worth to the farmer would depend upon his ability to convert all that fertility into crops at a profit. ”

“ We know that by such feeding we can return to the fields at least four fifths of all the plant-food taken out by the crops, and we loosely reason that such a scheme is demanded by nature. The maintenance of fertility involves good arithmetic, and a plant must have certain weights of mineral elements at command before it can grow, but it is not true that the productive power of land is chiefly dependent upon the return to it in manure of all the fertility removed by its crops. If this were true, meat and other animal products would be the sole food supply of the world's markets. ”

“ The soil is a great chemical laboratory, but exact knowledge of all its processes doubtless would enrich the farmer's vocabulary more than his pocketbook. We are concerned in knowing that lime's field of usefulness is broad in that it is an essential plant food and provides the active means of keeping the feeding ground of plants in sanitary condition. We want to know how it comes about that our soils are deficient in lime, and how we may determine the fact that they are deficient. ”

“ The organic sources of fertility, such as slaughter-house refuse, are containers of plant-food as surely as is stable manure. The inorganic sources, such as acid phosphate and muriate of potash, are containers of plant-food as surely as is animal bone or blood. There is no line that may be drawn to debar any substance that supplies plant-food profitably and contains no compound harmful to the soil. ”

“ On the other hand, we have learned very definitely within the last quarter of a century that it is foolish to depend upon commercial fertilizers and tillage and good seeds for full production of most crops from great areas of our farming country that have a marked lime deficiency. The obvious need of our soils is the rich organic matter that clover and grass sods could furnish, and their fundamental need is lime. Most farms cannot possibly make full returns to their owners until the land's hunger for lime has been met. ”

“ Grass is a heavy feeder, like corn, and makes good use of nitrogen. Its roots fill the soil so that no loss attends the use of manure. When the supply is given the grass, after the harvest of the second crop of clover and during the winter, the timothy can make a rank growth. The part of the plant above ground has corresponding development below ground. Not only does a large increase in the hay crop result, but the heavy mass of grass roots, the aftermath, and the remains of the manure provide a great amount of fertility for the corn which follows. ”

“ The value of heavy sods to a soil cannot be overestimated. They not only give to a farm a prosperous appearance, but our country's agriculture would be on a much safer basis if heavy coverings of grass were more universal. We do not hold the legumes in too high esteem, but the emphasis placed upon their ability to appropriate nitrogen from the air has caused some land-owners to fail in appreciation of the aid to soil fertility that may be rendered by the grasses. One often hears the statement that they can add nothing to the soil, and this is serious error. ”

“ If a soil is thin, or heavy, or light, the use of a ton of manure in this way can bring greater returns than under any other circumstances in general farming. It supplies some fertility, and it puts the surface soil into good physical condition for young plants. Land deficient in humus forms a crust after a rain, and a tiny plant suffers. A light dressing of manure, well mixed with the soil, tends to prevent this hardening of the surface and loss of water. There is no other form of fertility that can fully replace manure, for either compact or leachy land. ”

“ Setting aside the impression gained from the dissimilarity in the so-called corn, potato, wheat, and grass fertilizers on the market, the farmer knows that the soil which is in a good state of fertility is best for any of them, and if the soil is hard-run, it should have its plant-food supply supplemented. The hard-run soil usually is lacking in available supplies of all three plant-food constituents. If a fertilizer containing 3 per cent of nitrogen, 10 per cent of phosphoric acid, and 6 per cent of potash serves the wheat well, it will serve the timothy that starts in the wheat. ”

“ Very often a land-owner says, "I have a dozen kinds of soil in every field." This is true in a way, it may be, but if all the field has had the same treatment in the past, the probability is that the fertilizer which is best for one part of the field will be quite good for the other parts. The likeness in characteristics that permits the land to be cropped as one field gives some assurance of likeness in plant-food needs, even where the proportion of clay and sand varies and the color is not the same. ”

“ When soils have been robbed through the greed of man, nature is handicapped in her effort to restore fertility by the absence of the best seeds. Man's intelligent assistance is a necessity. Successful farming involves such assistance of nature that the percentage of vegetable matter in the soil shall be made high and kept high. There must be such selection of plants for this purpose that the organic matter will be rich in fertility, and at the same time their growth must fit into a scheme of crop production that can yield profit to the farmer. ”

“ It is a good practice to use the early summer in making conditions better for an August seeding, if the land has fallen below a profitable state of productiveness. A growth may be plowed down in time for firming the seed-bed, or it may be cut into the surface soil with a harrow, or the time may be used in freeing inert plant-food and destroying weed seed. On better soils, and in warm latitudes, a crop for hay may be removed, especially in the case of the cowpea in the south, and the stubble prepared for seeding by use of the cutaway or disk harrow. ”

“ As has been stated, every user of commercial fertilizer should learn what a pound of plant-food in unmixed material would cost him, selecting the common materials that are the only chief sources. If he can buy a pound of nitrogen in nitrate of soda or sulphate of ammonia, a pound of phosphoric acid in acid phosphate or steamed bone, and a pound of potash in muriate or sulphate of potash for less than they would cost in the factory-mixed goods offered him, allowing to himself a dollar or so a ton for the labor of mixing, it is only good business to buy the unmixed materials. ”