What other results should be expected from land containing in the plowed soil of an acre less than 1200 pounds of phosphorus and more than 36,000 pounds of potassium?

“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 to use their high-priced artificial soil stimulants, very large areas of land are being agriculturally abandoned.  Thus the following statement appears in the report of the United States Bureau of Census in regard to the farm land of Massachusetts: 

“The area of improved land decreased without interruption until in 1910 it was only about one-half what it was in 1880.”