It should not be forgotten, however, that market gardeners often sell from $100 to $300 worth of produce from an acre and they can well afford to use large amounts of soluble commercial plant food (acid phosphate, nitrates, etc.) as well as animal manures from the cities.

Is the Soil Inexhaustible?

It is not the fault of the farmer alone that soil-robbing and land ruin have followed his work in America.  Neither the average farmer of today nor any of his ancestors received any agricultural instruction in the schools; and the greedy fertilizer agent has persuaded him to buy his patent soil medicine and has taken $100 of the farmer’s money and given him in return only $10 worth of what he really needs to buy; and even the Bureau of Soils of the Federal Government has for several years promulgated the erroneous and condemnable theory expressed in the following quotations: 

“From the modern conception of the nature and purpose of the soil it is evident that it cannot wear out; that, so far as the mineral food is concerned, it will continue automatically to supply adequate quantities of the mineral plant foods for crops.” (United States Bureau of Soils, Bulletin No. 55, p. 79.)

“There is another way in which the fertility of the soil can be maintained:  namely, by arranging a system of rotation and growing each year a crop that is not injured by the excreta of the preceding crop:  then when the time comes round for the first crop to be planted again, the soil has had ample time to dispose of the sewage resulting from the growth of the plant two or three years before.”  (United States Farmers’ Bulletin No. 257, p. 21.)

“The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses.  It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that cannot be used up.” (United States Bureau of Soils, Bulletin No. 55, p. 66.)

And these are only samples of the false teaching spread abroad by this bureau of theorists, even though the congressmen of the United States can not enter the capitol of the nation from any direction without passing depleted and agriculturally abandoned lands.  Is it not in order to ask the Congress or the president of the United States how long the American farmer is to be burdened with these pernicious, disproved and condemnable doctrines poured forth and spread abroad by the Federal Bureau of Soils?

It is true that these erroneous teachings have been opposed or ridiculed in Europe; they have been denounced by the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists of the United States, and rejected by every land-grant college and agricultural experiment station that has been heard from, including those in forty-seven states; and yet this doctrine, emanating from what should be the position of highest authority, is the most potent of all existing influences to prevent the proper care of our soils.

The Values in Land