100 WHEAT 



CHAPTER IX 

 MAINTAINING SOIL FERTILITY 



Our agricultural teaching and modern methods 

 of farm practice have resulted in largely increased 

 crop yields at the expense of soil fertility. Experi- 

 ment stations and many farmers have been busy 

 investigating and applying better tillage methods 

 in the growing of wheat, and this is well. As the 

 writer has determined by experiments it is pos- 

 sible to double the yield of wheat in a single 

 season by careful and timely preparation of the 

 seed bed ; but the scientific tillage of the soil should 

 be combined with crop rotation, green manuring 

 and the use of barnyard manure and other neces- 

 sary fertilizers, or it will degenerate into a mining 

 proposition mining the soil of its fertility. 



In a sense, " tillage is manure" because the 

 favorable conditions produced by the cultivation 

 of the land cause the plant food in the soil to 

 become available faster than would be the case 

 without tillage. But good tillage alone will not 

 keep the soil fertile; rather it may cause the fer- 

 tility of the soil to become exhausted more rapidly 

 by the production of larger crops. There is also 

 a tendency to waste the soluble plant food by 

 drainage and soil drifting. The great problem 

 in western wheat farming today is not how to get 

 larger yields out of the soil for a few years, but 

 rather how to produce paying crops every year 

 and at the same time maintain the potential 

 fertility and productiveness of the land. 



