otassium?

"Working" the Land

If there is one agricultural fact that needs to be impressed upon
the American people it is that the farmers of this country have been
living, not upon the interest from their investments, but upon their
principal; and whatever measure of apparent prosperity they have had
has been taken from their capital stock. The boastful statement
sometimes made, that the American landowner has become a scientific
farmer, is as erroneous as it is optimistic. Such statements are
based upon a few selected examples or rare illustrations, and not
upon any adequate knowledge of general farm practice. Even to this
date almost every effort put forth by the mass of American farmers
has resulted in decreasing the fertility of the soil.

The productive power of normal land in humid climates depends almost
wholly upon the power of the soil to feed the crop; but the American
farmer does everything except to restore to the soil the plant food
required to maintain permanently its crop-producing power. These
ought be to have done, but not to leave the other undone. Thus, tile
drainage adds nothing to the soil out of which crops are made, but
only permits the removal of more fertility in the larger crops
produced on the well-drained land. More thorough tillage with our
improved implements of cultivation is merely "working the land for
all that's in it." The use of better seed produces larger crops, but
only at the expense of the soil. Even the farm manure is so limited
and is spread so thinly with manure-spreaders made for the purpose
that it adds but little to the soil in comparison with the crops
removed and sold in grain and hay as well as in meat and milk.
Clover, as commonly produced and harvested, adds little or no
nitrogen to the soil.

The ordinary high-priced, manufactured, acidulated, so-called
"complete" commercial fertilizers, in the small amounts that farmers
can afford to use, and do use quite generally in the older states,
serve in part as soil-stimulants and commonly leave the land poorer
year by year; and if the farmers of the great Corn and Wheat Belts
are ever to adopt systems of permanent agriculture, it must be done
in the near future, or they too will awake to find their lands
impoverished beyond self-redemption.

Even in the state of Massachusetts, where a most active campaign has
been waged for forty years by the mixed commercial fertilizer
interests, urging and persuading many farmers