140 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



Properly used, commercial plant foods may be very profitably used 

 to supplement the manurial products of the farm. If you wish to devote 

 more time to the matter this morning, it may be better to do so in dis- 

 cussion of questions which you may see fit to ask. 



THE PRODUCTIVE CAPACITY OF FIELDS AS INFLUENCED 



BY SOIL MANAGEMENT. 



(Prof. F. H. King. Madison. Wis.) 



The management of soils to establish, to increase and to maintain 

 a high productive capacity of fields is one of the oldest and most exten- 

 sively practiced arts of industrial life. Most barbaric and all civilized 

 people have fostered it. No other art or trade engages the attention 

 and absorbs the energies of so many families. 



With the vast and ever increasing demands made upon the ma- 

 terials for food, for apparel, for furnishings and for cordage, which are 

 the products of cultivated fields, better soil management must grow 

 more and more important as populations multiply. With the increasing 

 cost and ultimate exhaustion of mineral fuels ; with our timber vanishing 

 rapidly before the ever growing demands for lumber and paper ; with the 

 inevitably slow growth of trees and the very limited areas which the 

 world can ever afiford to devote to forestry, the time must surely come 

 when, in short period rotations, there will be grown upon the farm the 

 materials from which to manufacture, not only paper and substitutes for 

 lumber, but fuels as well. Not the complete utilization of the 

 power of every stream which reaches the sea, reinforced by the force of 

 the winds and the energy of the waves which may be transformed along 

 coast lines can meet the demands of the future for power and heat; 

 and hence only in the event of science and engineering skill becoming 

 able to devise means for transforming the unlimited energy of space 

 through which we are ever whirled, with an economy approximating 

 that which farm crops now exhibit, can good soil management be re- 

 lieved of the task of meeting a portion of the world's demand for power 

 and heat. 



While the lands which may be laid under tribute by good soil man- 

 agement, to augment future supplies, extend from the shore lines of 

 the sea to the snow lines of the mountains and of the polar zones ; each 

 year they are becoming unavailable by hundreds of square miles through 

 the expansion of cities and the multiplication of homes and summer 

 cottages; through the extension of railways, trolley lines, canals and 



