Com Growers* Association. 335 



the American Breeders' Association for publication in its annual 

 report. This would give us a complete directory of the established 

 strains of corn of the United States, and sources from which seed 

 may be obtained and a national organization for the improvement 

 of corn. With an active organization of this kind, the production of 

 corn within your State and within the United States would not 

 long remain below thirty bushels per acre. 



SOME EXPERIMENTS WITH FERTILIZERS ON CORN IN 



MISSOURI IN 1906. 



(H. A. Huston, Illinois.) 



The principles regarding soil fertility and the desirability of 

 supplementing manures and leguminous crops with additional plant 

 food have been set forth so fully in the addresses of the distin- 

 guished experimenters from other States, who have presented the 

 results of their investigations to you at this meeting, that it only 

 remains for me to bring before you the results of some experiments 

 conducted in Missouri, by farmers, under ordinary farm conditions. 

 These are, of course, less elaborate than the work of the experiment 

 stations, but they may, perhaps, be none the less interesting to you, 

 because they are intended to connect directly with the ordinary 

 farm operations and to supplement the materials already in com- 

 mon use. 



The experiments mentioned below use, as a starting point, the 

 fertilizers already in common use in the State, and illustrate what 

 can be done when a partial fertilizer like bone receives an addition 

 required to make it into a ivell balanced "complete" fertilizer, or 

 when a badly balanced "complete" fertilizer receives an addition to 

 make it better balanced. It will be noticed that nitrogen in the 

 form of blood, and in some cases bone also, is used. It is a matter 

 of common observation in the Central West that the experiments on 

 corn show practically no gain from nitrogen in commercial forms. 

 Yet in these experiments it was used in order that the full effect 

 of the mineral fertilizers might not be reduced by the lack of nitro- 

 gen. In farm practice, nitrogen for corn must, of course, be de- 

 rived from manure and leguminous crops. The corn plant uses 

 nitrogen from these coarse materials with great facility. 



Last year we considered an experiment at Raymondville, Mo., 

 by Mr. Geo. C. Martin, on a very poor type of soil. This year Mr. 



