172 Missouri Agyicultural Report. 



commercial forms of phosphorus to make up this loss. Indeed as 

 our experiments plainly show our soils will already respond more 

 quickly to the application of this element than to any other and 

 on the average Missouri upland that system of farming which will 

 ultimately prove most profitable will be one in which the phos- 

 phorus supply is thus maintained. The form of phosphate to use 

 will depend somewhat upon the system of farming, but in most 

 cases some cheap phosphate, such as rock phosphate or basic slag 

 applied with manure, will be most remunerative. The Tennessee 

 rock phosphate can be secured in Missouri for about $10.00 per 

 ton in car lots and where a man is feeding in a shed or stable the 

 phosphate may either be scattered over the manure from time to 

 time as it is made, or it may be scattered over the manure in the 

 spreader as it is loaded, applying it at the rate of from 50 pounds 

 to 100 pounds per ton of manure. Bone may be used but it is usu- 

 ally better to apply this bone with a fertilizer drill directly to 

 the soil shortly before or at the same time the crop is put in. 



I do not maintain that it is necessary to add phosphorus on 

 any soil of the State to secure fair returns from it, if the proper 

 system of rotation, legume growing and cattle feeding is adopted, 

 but I do maintain that on all soils that are strikingly low in phos- 

 phorus its use will in most cases pay immediate profits and that 

 where the phosphorus unavoidably removed in the best system 

 of agriculture is returned in some commercial form or in feeds 

 purchased the productiveness of the land will be measureably in- 

 creased. 



I am very well aware that many of the methods I have sug- 

 gested will be considered not only impractical but unnecessary by 

 many men who have all their lives been practicing other systems. 

 I know many men, too, who having gone on land that was not in 

 its highest state of fertility and who by simple rotation and only 

 partial feeding have seen the land increased in productiveness 

 until it is better today than it was fifteen or twenty years ago. 

 Such men think they have solved the problem of maintaining soil 

 fertility, and, so far as the span of their own lives is concerned, 

 this is doubtless true; but should their boys continue this same 

 system for another generation its shortcomings will become ap- 

 parent, just as they have become apparent on thousands of farms 

 in the east. And whatever may be our theories, or the observa- 

 tions of a single lifetime, the history of the farms of the eastern 

 states has shown- us that no system of agriculture is permanently 

 profitable which does not maintain fully the humus supply as well 



