The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1904-10-15

| lands.
c. H. D.
Following is The Century's article:
Did you vaccfnate your land this
year?'' was the startling question
heard one farmer ask another the other
day. well, I guess" he replied. You
remember that corner field which L
gave UP as hopeless last year? Well,
when [ heard about the yeast cakes the
government was giving free with the
promise that they'd make clover or al
faIfa grow where we farmers couldn't
raise anything but weeds, and thin
weeds at that, 1 thought I'd send for
several of the cakes. When the cakes
came, / vaccinated the field according
to instructions, planting it in alfalfa.
l tell you, I've had three whopping
crops, and I've got off that formerly
worthless field five times more than I've
been getting off my best land, and I've
got some pretty good land, too"
We have grown accustomed to the
idea of being vaccinated. Some of our
most dread diseases have been van
quished or checked by inoculation,-
smallpox, diphtheria, rabies and, we
hope, the plague,-but to cure sterile
ground and make it bring forth fruit in
abundance by incubation is something
so strange and revolutionary that we
should not believe the statement were
it not for convincing and irrefutable
facts.
Before explaining the discovery and
manner of this extraordinary process of
agricultural science, it might be we'll
to review a few well-known facts in the
life of plants.
One of the most important elements
of the food of plant is nitrogen, which
it absorbs from the soil mainly through
its roots; successive crops Of grain soon
drain the soil of it's plant-food, and in
process of time make the richest land
poor and worthless.
A good farmer partly balances the
drain on his soil by using plentiful
quantities of manure and fertilizer, and
thus puts back much of the nitrogen
which his crops remove.
We send to Chile thousands of miles
away, for help, and at much expense
import from her thousands of tons of
costly nitrate, though we have all about
us-in the air we Observation-Disclosures
stores of fertilizer. Free nitrogen forms
seven tenths of the atmosphere. 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 of putting it
into the ground. It's simplicity has baf-
fled us. Like the plenty that tormented
Tantalus, it has ever e1uded our grasp.
We are taking the nitrogen from the
soil SO much faster than we can put
it back that some persons have predict
day, and have luridIy described the hor-
rors that will fall upon US when the
soil becomes so poverty stricken that
our crops of wheat and grain and rice
will fail to feed the nations. While this |
view is of course partly imaginative, |
and exaggerates the nearness of the |
danger, the fact remains that many
areas in England and Europe and the |
eastern United States, formerly fertile, |
are now unproductive because the nj +
trogen in the soil has been exhausted.
But now man has captured a tiny |
germ invisible to the naked eye, which |
can take from the boundless store of .
he has coveted, and put it into
the earth for him.
Ever since the time of P1iny, farmers
have noticed that after a crop of peas, +
alfalfa, 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 reason certain plants enrich
the ground while others exhaust it re-
NAMED a mystery until an inquiring
German discovered some years ago that
peas, beans, etc, obtained their nitro
gen food not from the nitrates in the
soil, but from the free supply in she
air. He also discovered that these
plants absorbed much more nitrogen
than they could use and left the surplus
in the soil. That is, beans, peas, alfal-
IA. clover. put back into the mother
earth what corn and wheat and grains
remove. The manner in which they
do this is unique and another instance
of the marvellous and mysterious laws
by which the balance of nature is main,
tanned.
If one digs up a healthy bean or
clover plant and examines the roots he
will see a number of rounded bulbs
called nodules or tubercles, on the roats
At first sight he might imagine that
the plant had a lot of sores over it,
that it was diseased, or had been hit
ten by worms or insects. All legunes
have these nodules or tubercles, vary
ing in size from a pinhead to clusters
as large as good-sized pot to-
-oianfiStS noticed that DlantS with go ad-