CHAPTEE XL 

 THE MAINTENANCE OF FERTILITY. 



The maintaining and increasing of the productive capacity of the soil 

 in a profitable manner should be the ultimate aim in the use of manures and 

 fertilizers of any kind, and not the mere speculating on how much sale crop 

 we can get through the use of a certain fertilizer mixture. This has been 

 the course over large sections of the country, especially among the cotton 

 farmers of the South, until with the majority of the farmers the first question 

 asked is, "How much and what kind of fertilizer shall I use to get a certain 

 crop ?" Men frequently write to me that they have a certain field which last 

 year made, say, ten bushels of corn per acre, and they want to know what and 

 how much fertilizer they shall apply to that same field to make it produce 50 

 bushels of corn per acre. We have to reply, of course, that it cannot be done 

 in that way. The physical and mechanical condition of the soil has as much 

 to do with its productivity as the amount of plant-food it may contain. When 

 a field, through a long course of bad treatment, has been deprived of its 

 humus, and has gotten into a bad mechanical condition, no amount of fertil- 

 izer will at once restore it to its normal state of productiveness. It took 

 years to complete the robbery of the soil and years of proper farming will be 

 required to restore it. 



USING FERTILIZERS IN" CONTINUOUS CROPPING. 



There are many men in the South who imagine that they are farming 

 profitably by growing cotton year after year on the same ground with an an- 

 nual application of fertilizers, simply because they show some profit over the 

 cost, and not reflecting that they could secure greater profits by proper rota- 

 tion and a smaller expenditure of fertilizers. As compared with real farm- 

 ing, their cultivation can easily be shown to be unprofitable. Especially is 

 this true when the crops are the cereal grains. At the Ohio Station a long 



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