Norwich bulletin., 1921-10-28
GETTING AT THE HIDDEN SECRETS OF THE SOIL

Elowi0dss these paEieaf. tIrelcsa. self ignoring searchers of tao dirt have opened up to us.
 When you've cut aud. cured and barn ed two tons of dry clover hay from one of your acres, what have you taken out of that acre? Forty hundred pounds of leaves and stalks from of the top oi the ground? Ye-ee, you've done that. But Tn that two tons you've taken a good deal more. You've taken so pounds of nitrogen and 10 pounds ot phosphorus end 50 pounds of potash and 5s pounds of lime and 1e pounds of magnesium and several pounds of iron and carbon and sulphur in that two tons of dry clover hay. say 240 pounds al- together. Two hundred and forty pounds of plant food, which were in the top six inches of that acre when you planted the crop, and which the crop has eaten up and you've toted away. That's going some, you'll admit if you'll kindly wind up your brains and let them think about iti
 When farmer gets to that point that he can sec, in every hundred bush els ct corn he sells, about F pounds of phosphorus and 19 pounds of potash and 125 pounds of nitrogen leaving his farm for good, to say nothing about iE1e and Iron and carbon and the rest. he's usually open to argument and amenable 1 to reason.
 Said won Liebig, one of the wisest and ' clearest- headed of all the great agricui- tural chemists, more than sixty years ago; It is not the land itself which constitutes the farmers wealth. but 1t is in the constituents of the soil which serve for the nutrition of plants that @1-f .IAT. oVaft chew on that for a minute or two.
 You can't keep on taking these plant foods out of the soil without inapover- ishing l. That's about as clear and simple as 1t is to say that two and tive make four. or that two from two leaves nothing.
 I remarked. above. that. after you and yours had finished with thai Thanksgiving dinner the table looked sick" That's the very word I've heard dozens of old farmers apply to lant they had cro.oed and cropped and crop ped til t wouldn't evep grow cover "Clover-sick." thev .,aed to call it. Tlis word is narfect'~ ct. Such land l: "sick," sick fro starvation.
 Now we have been. for years trying to cure this land-d:sease or, properly
 
 And, so far as our attainable supoiy O man1re would go, we've succeeded fair " wei. But ali the manure from ani rnais fed on farm-produced rationf doesn't make up the loss. Feeding tw' tons Of clover and saving every bit 0 the resultant manure, solid and liquid and putting 1t, ali back on the acre tn clover was naown from won't fully re store the riant-food taken of. The ami nal adds nothing of quantity to tlle>na nure. Instead. the anima' takes fo- it own l,ody growth an appreciabl' amount of the essential clements con talned in the clover. The animal trans forms the unused residue of it's food in to condition more readily available { , the plants. But ie increases the amour returnable no whit. Instead. it 6inin l, ishes that. amount by a considerable per cent.
 "Fshaw." says some obicctor, there
 such lot of all these various ? ant foods in good land that they'll last ur told years. No need worryin. Vel the government bureau Of soils report
 of a certain iong-cropped and worn-eu
 area in Maryland that it now contain
 to the acre 16O pounds of phosphoru,
 IS 500 pounds of potash, 3,4S0 pounds C
 magnesium and 1000 pounds of calciur l (ime.) Every hundred bushels Of cor
 removes from the soil about IT pound
 of phosphorus. Less than enough in tina
 soil for ten years, you'll observe. An