The Hope pioneer. [volume] (Hope, N.D.) 1882-1964, 1911-11-09
IS FERTILITY
NECESSARY?

AuuSAA oASCOSSAOu dS W Wu0Uu0r 10rGlllGy
is needed to grow crops or not, the
following extract from an address by
Prof. ]. 81. Shepperd before the North
DAKOTA Academy Of Science is inter-
esting:
England is credited with producing
fifty million bushels of wheat per year.
She imports two hundred million
bushels of wheat and takes pains to
import that rs wheat instead of as
-four for the sake of getting fer
Utility which is contained in the bran
and shorts portions of the kernel al
most exclusively. She imports one
hundred million bushels of corn and
nearly a billion pounds of oil cake
per year. In addition to this man.
moth annual source Of fertility she i'm
ports large quantities of PHOSPHORUS.
These importations of grain result in
the production of a vast quantity Of
stable manure in Britain which is la
vishly applied to the fields which are
planteQ 10 grain.
DR.. Bernard Dyer, in his American
lectures on the results of investiga-
ton on the Rothamstad soils in dis.
cussing the Boradbalk wheat plat that
has produced a crop of wheat each
year since 1874, after stating that it
had been given an annual application
of l6 7 tons of farm manure each year
during that time, used the following
sentence: sit is to be borne in mind,
however, that the quality of manure
used in these continuous wheat grow.
ing experiments is on the yearly aver
age far less than would be used in
practical agriculture on any of the
rotation systems"
This recalls to my mind the state
ment of u Scottish herdsmen at the
Agricultural College, who in CONVEX
sation with me about the method of
top dressing pasture and meadow
lands in Scotland, remarked that the
Scottish farmer did not put on his
stable anu with a pepper box and
seemed to have the idea that the quaint
ity applied here is very light when we
do make application of that product
to u lands. In addition to this, Eng
land began importing Guano as early
as 1856 at the rate of two hundred
thousand tons annually from South
America and the sea islands. The
Guanos contain from Is per cent. of
nitrogen and S per cent. phosphorus to
about l per cent. nitrogen and Is per
cent. Of phosphorus.
Altman in discussing manures wrote
in 1894 of the use of bones for fertiliz-
ers in England. He stated that they
first employed bones for fertilizers in
l774 and that their use has steadily in
creased ever since. He also stated
their popularity among farmers is un.
rivaled.
Baron Liebig raised a warning pro-
test against their using bones in such
large quantities, saying, that England
was robbing all other countries of
their fertility. England is said to have
turned up the battle fields of Leipzig,
Waterloo and of the Crimea and to
carried away from the catacombs of
Sicily the skeletons of many genera
tions. Altman sums up his uncanny
statement in these words: "Annually
she RECEIVERS from the shores of other
countries to her own the manural
equivalent of three million and a half
of men," England also supplied her
soil with one hundred thousand tons
of Stag phosphorus per year before the
close of the last century and at the
present time is credited with using
three hundred thousand tons per
annum.
BY this process of gathering the
worlds fertility and heaping it up on
the tight little island' regularly and
systematically for centuries and of
shipping nothing out Of the country
that has fertilizing value, she bears
the strongest evidence of what fertility,
coupled with her rainfall and her hum
i'd air, which allows the minimum es-
cape OF moisture in the production of a
ton of dry material in a crop, will do
for the crop yields of q country.
Germany shows much the same con.
dition, though a somewhat lighter
yield than England and while she has
ranged less widely in gathering fertil-
ity, she ships out of her country little
besides sugar which commodity con.
tains little or none of the elements OF
crop fertility.
Denmark sells butter as almost her
exclusive export product. a material
which at the commercial rate of fertil.
izers as they are sold on the marke,
carries off 48c worth per ton while
wheat bran on the same basis shows a
value for its fertilizing ingredients Of