No. 7. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 151 



air could not enter it. The humus has been burned out of that soil 

 and it is close together and in a condition of acidity. I am not 

 enough of a chemist to explain all this, and 1 am afraid we are going 

 to get this mixed. Wherever manure has gone without something 

 to correct the acidity of the soil, we have not the strong clover seed 

 that we desire. 



MR. SEEDS: Will the same facts work out on every farm as it 

 works out there? 



MR. AGEE: No, I do not think they will. 



MR. HULL: I have applied lime and cannot see that I have ever 

 received a dollar of benefit from it. I never have used phosphate on 

 land to produce clover. I have land that will produce timothy and 

 fairly good clover. I would like to ask why timothy is not more 

 used? I can grow a crop of timothy that will produce more humus 

 to plow under than I can of clover and yet nobody says anything in 

 favor of timothy. ** 



MR. SCHWARZ: I would like to ask Mr. Agee a question. Is 

 not the disappearance of clover entirely attributable to the overuse 

 of lime. I think that is a fact that can't be disputed; that condition 

 existed before acid phosphate was ever used or thought of. Acid 

 phosphate did not bring it back, but made it worse. Now wasn't it 

 because the lime exhausted the humus of the soil? 



MR. AGEE: That is exactly true; but that does not prove anything 

 against this idea that where lime is put to excess on the ground, it 

 burns out the vegetable matter. Where you can control the mois- 

 ture, you can control the soil, but that has nothing under the sun to 

 do with this other proposition. 



I feel that w^e must state the truth accurately because we are 

 teachers, and if the soil is limestone, if you are failing to get clover, 

 to affect a limestone soil, a thousand pounds of lime per acre is not 

 sufficient; in that case you have got to use 50 or GO barrels of lime 

 per acre, so don't advise the men at the institutes to use a thousand 

 pounds of lime on limestone soil, but tell them where clover is fail- 

 ing to make this test. 



PROF. HANTZ: I have a field that has been limed, where a lime- 

 kiln has been burned, and I have raised clover there for ten years, 

 and to-day it is a thick meadow of the best clover, and west of it there 

 is no clover. I would like to ask why is that clover growing there 

 for ten years? If you don't believe this, you can come to my farm 

 and see it all matted over with clover. I know there have been hun- 

 dreds of barrels of lime put upon that one lot. 



MR. AGEE: In that case, he has simply grown clover and returned 

 the humus to that soil, and the lime has done no harm, but the lime 



