The Twin Falls times. [volume] (Twin Falls, Idaho) 1905-1916, 1909-02-11

yields OF crops In return. But the
average farmer does not do this and
his farm gets poorer and poorer and he
does likewise, until they often part
company and those who were depend
ant on that farm go hungry.
This is what the great Liebig saw
when over half century ago his
warning cry went out to England and
he said:
Nothing will more certainly con-
summate the ruin of England than the
scarcity of fertilizers. 1t means the
scarcity of food. 1t is impossible that
such a sinful violation of the divine
laws of nature should forever remain
unpublished, and the time will probably
come for England sooner than for any
other country When, with all of her
wealth in gold, iron and coal, she will
be unable to buy the one-thousandth
part of the food which she has during
hundreds of years thrown recklessly
away"
Few at that time gave thought to
this advice. We may call it warning
of danger. They went on as before,
thinking only of the time at hand, but
today the news flashes throughout the
land that England has 2,0000 900 unem-
deed have been truer prophets. That
man could see then what many can see
today and that is that the farm lands
of the world were becoming more eX-
hausted each year.
Necessity has been called the mother
of invention, and can be called also
the mother of investigation. For years
some OF our greatest students have
been looking for the trouble and the
remedy. Their investigations show
that eight-tenths of our atmosphere is
nitrogen, and only one-tenth of one per
cent carbon, that while the plant could
get it's full supply of carbon from the
| air. the plant cannot use the nitrogen in
| the plant cannot use the nitrogen in
| this form. 1t could not use nitrogen
as gas, badly as it needed it, 1t had
| to be changed SO that it could feed
upon it through it's roots and there
| they had to stop. But long before the
| fact was realized or the Investigations
made, alfalfa and clover were doing
what no man has yet been able to do,
namely, Transforming enough Of the
| nitrogen of the air to plant food for it's
own use, and, after years of vigorous
growth, leave the land upon which it
grew, full of rich plant life and make
| Luc CIOpS lHdJ lOliOW IL uldly liuicS
more profitable and at no expense to
man. All this is accomplished by the
|nitrogen-fxing- bacteria which are pre-
sent to greater or less degree in all
soils. They thrive and multiply to
wonderful degree on the roots of these
two !,!ants, and have the power of fix
ing free nitrogen of the air and making
it available for plant food, SO that by
rotating alfalfa and clover at regular
periods with other crops, field can be
held up to it's best for all time to come.
The man who can make two blades
of grass grow where one grew before"
has always been considered a great
benefactor to his race, but plant that
can not only cause two blades to grow
in place of one, but can make two
grow where none grew before, and can
make them grow better and better, and
: can make wealth and more wealth for
the man who will give 1t the necessary
, opportunity is truly a prize, the value
of which no man can apprise. Forum
5 ate indeed is the homemaker whose lot
t is cast in the favorable land where
, king alfalfa reigns supreme, for the
time will never come when his land Is
, worth less than it was the day he
: broke the virgin sod, but instead will
become better and richer as the years
roll by. In his prosperous old age he
| can look around him and rejoice in the
, fact that he has been the most favored
Of men, and that fortune has been kind
to him.