The Farm That Won't Wear OutHopkins, Cyril G. (Cyril George)
Science
The Farm That Won't Wear Out
Hopkins, Cyril G. (Cyril George)
Agriculture; Fertilizers; Soils
"From the modern conception of the nature and purpose of the soil it
is evident that it cannot wear out; that, so far as the mineral food
is concerned, it will continue automatically to supply adequate
quantities of the mineral plant foods for crops." (United States
Bureau of Soils, Bulletin No. 55, p. 79.)
"There is another way in which the fertility of the soil can be
maintained: namely, by arranging a system of rotation and growing
each year a crop that is not injured by the excreta of the preceding
crop: then when the time comes round for the first crop to be
planted again, the soil has had ample time to dispose of the sewage
resulting from the growth of the plant two or three years before."
(United States Farmers' Bulletin No. 257, p. 21.)
"The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation
possesses. It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted; that
cannot be used up." (United States Bureau of Soils, Bulletin No. 55,
p. 66.)
And these are only samples of the false teaching spread abroad by
this bureau of theorists, even though the congressmen of the United
States can not enter the capitol of the nation from any direction
without passing depleted and agriculturally abandoned lands. Is it
not in order to ask the Congress or the president of the United
States how long the American farmer is to be burdened with these
pernicious, disproved and condemnable doctrines poured forth and
spread abroad by the Federal Bureau of Soils?
It is true that these erroneous teachings have been opposed or
ridiculed in Europe; they have been denounced by the Association of
Official Agricultural Chemists of the United States, and rejected by
every land-grant college and agricultural experiment station that
has been heard from, including those in forty-seven states; and yet
this doctrine, emanating from what should be the position of highest
authority, is the most potent of all existing influences to prevent
the proper care of our soils.
The Values in Land
It was Baron von Liebig who taught, both in Germany and in England,
that--"it is not the land itself that constitutes the farmer's
wealth, but it is in the constituents of the soil, which serve for
the nutrition of plants, that this wealth truly consists." And it is
in the application of this teaching, completely verified by sixty
years of investigation and demonstration by Lawes and Gilbert at
Rothamsted, that England has been able to raise her 10-year average
yield of wheat to 37-1/2 bushels an acre, while the average for the
United States stands at 14 bushels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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