No. ?. DEPARTMENT OiF AGRICULTURE. 439 



people in the United States and all these people must be fed frojn 

 the soil, so we want to take better care of it and give the land its 

 share, no matter wiiether farming land or grazing land. If you are 

 a tenant farmer you can rob your landlord year after year. I think 

 I have had tenants to treat me that way. But if you are a land 

 owner you cannot rob the land year after year without it resenting 

 that kind of treatment. It will simply shut itself up to you and say: 

 "You have not given me a square deal; you have robbed me and I 

 don't propose longer to give you a good crop." From the^se pasture 

 lands you have been driving the livestock off for years. If it is a 

 dairy farm you have been selling the milk off and in that milk there 

 is a certain amount of plant food, and three elements that are found 

 deficient in soils: nitrogen, potash and phosphorus. Whether we 

 sell beef, mutton or milk we are taking available phosphorus from 

 our lands. So, my friends, it is up to you to return this plant food 

 to the soil in some way. It has been shown that many of our 

 pasture fields have run out because the lime-content is too low. 

 There is an acid condition in the soil and it is necessary if we wish 

 to grow good pastures, to apply lime to the soil. 



The question of lime is interesting a great many people at this 

 time. We are just now wakening up to the fact that nearly all of 

 our soils are deficient in lime. Over in my state a few years ago 

 a farmer came to me who had a limestone field of seventy acres, lying 

 all over it was limestone rock. His clover had failed in this field and 

 he wanted to know what was wrong with his ground. I said: "I 

 suspect your land is sour." He replied: ''It could not be. There is 

 limestone all over my land. It is actually in the way." I said: 

 "Have you tested the soil for acidity; -if not test it." The man got 

 blue litmus paper and applied it to his soil and found a great deal of 

 acidity in it and he applied five hundred pounds of granulated lime 

 to the acre and the next year got a fine crop of clover and has been 

 growing clover ever since. That proved that even these limestone 

 soils are becoming deficient in lime and we have got to apply the 

 lime and there is nothing under the sun that will take its place. I 

 had a letter recently from a farmer who said: "I want to plant 

 twenty acres of corn" — that letter was from this State — "and I am 

 in doubt as to whether to use phosphoric acid or lime on the land. 

 What would you apply?" If that land needs phosphorus there is 

 nothing will take the place of phosphorus, and if it needs lime there 

 is nothing to take the place of lime. Test your soil and supply what 

 it needs. I also told him that the probabilities were that the land 

 needed both the phosphorus and the lime, because most of the soils in 

 our state — and that is largely true in this State — are deficient in 

 phosphorus as well as lime. You have been selling the small grains 

 off the farm and these grains have carried away a great deal of the 

 phosphorus, and possibly the manure has not been saved as care- 

 fully as it should have been and you have been losing there and the 

 soils are all deficient in phosphorus and we must supply it. 



Going back to the lime question: There are various forms of lime 

 we can use on the pasture fields. Where you have the limestone, as 

 you have it up the valley between here and Hagerstown, all I be- 

 lieve you need to do is to crush that limestone and scatter it over the 

 fields. It is the safest form in which to use lime, because you will 

 not burn up the humus when you apply that ground limestone. There 

 is danger, friends, in using too much caustic lime. That burns up 



