Arizona republican., 1904-10-05
What Science Has Done for the
 Farmer.

heard one farmer ask another the oth- CT day Well. I guess" he replied. You remember that corner field gave up as hopeless last year? Well, when heard about the yeast cakes the gov ernment was giving free with the prom ise that they'd make clover or alfalfa grow where we farmers couldn't raise anything but weeds. and thin weeds at that, thought I'd send for several of the cakes. When the cakes came vaccinated the field according to in structions, planting it in alfalfa. tell you I have had three whopping crops, and I've got off that worthless field five times more than I'd been getting off my best land. and I've got some pretty good land, too"
 Thus MT. Gilbert H. Grosvenor be- gins an article of extraordinary inter- est in the October Century, descriptive of the new process of inoculating the ground with nitrogen-a process which the officials Of the department of agri- culture at Washington firmly believe will revolutionize the industry of agri- culture. The process was patented in March of this year by pr. George T. Moore, who has charge of the depart ment of plant physiology in the depart ment. Immediately upon securing his patent, Dr. Moore made free gift of it to the United States government. The patent was secured after experi- ments made last year. similar to that cited by MT. Grosvenor in the begin ming of his article, had demonstrated that the discovery is of inestimable value.
 The Century article must be read in full for the reader to appreciate fully what 1t means for the farmer to be able to fertilize his soil by the new process. We can merely summarize here the principal facts for The Repub- lican's readers.
 MT. Grosvenor makes the elementary explanation that one of the most im- portant parts of the food of a plant is nitrogen, which it absorbs from the soil mainly through it's roots; success sive crops of grain soon drain the soil of it's plant-food, and in process of time make the richest land poor and worth less. A good farmer, he points out, partly balances the drain on his soil by using plentiful quantities of manure and fertilizer, and thus puts back much of the fertilizer which his crops re- move. We send to Chilli thousands of miles away, for thousands Of tons Of costly nitrate. though we have all about us, in the air we breathe, ex- haustless stores of fertilizer. Free nit rogen forms seven-tenths of the atmos- phere. If we could tap and use this sea of nitrogen. we could fertilize the whole earth and keep it rich; but it has been of no use to us hitherto because we have had no means of capturing it and putting it into the ground. Its simplicity has baffled us.
 But pr. Moore has captured a tiny germ invisible to the naked eye, which can take from the boundless store of nitrogen which man has coveted, and put 1t into the earth for him. Ever since the time of Pliny, farmers have noticed that after a crop of peas, alfal- ia, or any of the leguminous plants, a heavier yield of wheat can be obtain ed. Thus has arisen the old profitable rule of rotation of crops. But the req son certain plants enrich the ground while others exhaust it remained a mystery until scientists discovered that alfalfa and other similar crops obtain .1 4L 1 trates in the soil. but from the free supply in the air It was discovered. also. that these plants absorbed much more nitrogen than they could use and left the surplus in the soil. That Is. beans, peas, alfalfa, put back into mother earth what corn and wheat and barley remove. They do this through the bacteria on their roots.
 All ranchers in the Salt River valley have noted that when they turned un- der a field of alfalfa the production of grain crops on that field thereafter was greatly increased. Observing ranchers have noted. also. that the des- ert soil produces alfalfa as a first crop better than it will produce anything else. This is because the plant-food in the soil is lacking in nitrogen. The soil, itself, it has been proved here H. the valley, absorbs a certain amount of nitrogen from the atmosphere. Thus, in leveling a section of the desert for irrigation, the higher points from which the surface soil Is removed are impoverished. while the depr essions iu the ground. filled with the surface soil from higher points. will yield twice the quality of grain that can be obtain ed from the same area of "scraped" ground. Residents of the city have aI- so noticed that when the surface soil is removed in the preparation of lawns, plant growth is unsatisfactory without fertilization. This is not because the desert soil is thin, but because it lacks in nitrogen until alfalfa or some sini- lar crop has been grown