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INOCULATING THE GROUND : A REMARKABLE 

 DISCOVERY IN SCIENTIFIC AGRICULTURE,* 



By Gilbert H. Grosvenor. 



" Did you vaccinate your land this year ?" was the startling 

 question I heard one farmer ask another the other day, " Well, 

 I guess," he replied. " You remember that corner field which I 

 gave up as hopeless last year. Well, when I heard about the 

 yeast cake the government was giving free with the promise that 

 they'd make clover or alfalfa grow where we farmers couldn't 

 raise anything but weeds, and thin weeds at that, 1 thought I'd 

 send for several of the cakes. When the cakes came, I vaccinated 

 the field according to instructions, planting it in alfalfa. I tell 

 you, I 've had three whopping crops, and 1 've got off that formerly 

 worthless field five times more than I 've been getting off my best 

 land, and I 've got some pretty good land too." 



We have grown accustomed to the idea of being vaccinated. 

 Some of our most dread diseases have been vanquished or checked 

 by inoculation, — small-pox, diphtheria, rabies, and we hope, the 

 plague, — but to cure sterile ground and make it bring forth fruit 

 in abundance by inoculation is something so strange and revolu- 

 tionary that we should not believe the statement were it not for 

 convincing and irrefutable facts. 



Before explaining the discovery and manner of this extraordinary 

 process of agricultural science, it might be well to review a few 

 well known facts in the life of plants. 



One of the most important elements of the food of a plant is 

 nitrogen, which it absorbs from the soil mainly through its roots ; 

 successive crops of grain soon drain the soil of its plant-food, and 

 in process of time makes the richest land poor and worthless. 



A good farmer partly balances the drain on his soil by using 

 plentiful quantities of manure and fertilizer, and thus puts back 

 much of the nitrogen which his crops remove. 



We send to Chile, thousands of miles away, for help, and at 

 much expense import from her thousands of tons of costly nitrate, 

 though we have all about us — in the air we breathe — exhaustless 

 stores of fertilizer. Free nitrogen forms seven tenths of the 

 atmosphere. If we could tap and use this sea of nitrogen, we could 

 fertilize the whole earth and keep it rich ; but it has been of no use 

 to us hitherto because we have had no means of capturing it and 

 of putting it into the ground. Its simplicity has baffled us. Like 

 the plenty that tormented Tantalus it has ever eluded our grasp. 



We are taking the nitrogen from the soil so Uiuch faster than 

 we can put it back that some persons have predicted a " nitrogen 

 famine" at no distant day, and have luridly described the horrors 

 that will fall upon us when the soil becomes so poverty-stricken 

 that our crops of wheat and grain and rice will fail to feed the 

 nations. While this view is of course partly imaginative, and 

 exaggerates the nearness of the danger, the fact remains that many 



* The " Century Muguziiie," Oct 1904. 



