278 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



nate use of these sources of plant food. The nitrogen, phosphorous 

 and potash in 100 pounds of corn, will cost you on the market, 43 

 cents, or close to the sale value of your corn, as an average of a 

 series of years. But this is not all ; it will cost you more than this 

 to grow the stalks on which the 100 pounds of corn are grown. I 

 need not have alluded to this — did not the full, able and continued 

 discussion of chemical fertilization in the "Rural World" of recent 

 date demonstrate that you are using, and more seriously thinking 

 of using, fertilizers on an increasing scale? Wheat, having a 

 higher sale value per pound, may warrant on some soils requiring 

 only a one-sided treatment, or one or two of the elements of plant 

 food, their use. Dean Waters tells me that the study of your soils 

 by the college, has shown a very general deficit of phosphorous. 

 This costs but a little per pound, and is required by plants in only a 

 relatively small proportion, and its use would certainly be war- 

 ranted on the premise that phosphorous is the weak link in the 

 chain of soil elements of plant food for the soils of Missouri. But 

 phosphorous, I have found in thirty years' inquiry, despite the op- 

 posite view until lately held by chemists and propagated by fer- 

 tilizer manufacturers, is available from floats or insoluble phos- 

 phates. My acid soil dissolves it, and your rich humus soil will 

 do the same work. Here is the hope of your wheat farms, and, in 

 fact, your reasonably safe way to lift the level of your soil fertility 

 by strengthening this weak link. 



I regret that in this summary of the leading factors essential 

 to successful farm management, I have been unable to detail and 

 specialize more. Broadly re-stated, I have based successful farm 

 management upon mental force, upon far-reaching farm improve- 

 ments, such as are likely to come only in the permanency of the 

 family line on the farm, and upon the application of capital and 

 labor to land as applied to other industries in extent sufficient to 

 give a greatly increased volume of crop returns to the full capacity 

 of the farm and the man associated with the farm. 



My special appeal to you in this relation is to cease thinking 

 in small crops and small results, when your farms have undeveloped 

 capacities far above those realized upon. With lands capable of 

 forty to fifty bushels of wheat per acre and other crops in like 

 ratio, never permit yourselves to think in the low and discreditable 

 levels of your State averages. Cease leaning on nature to any 

 extent, merely dragging after the growing demands of a widening 

 culture, as you are competent to look sharply into the great and 



