CHAPTER XVII. 

 FERTILIZERS FOR THE CORN CROP. 



While, like tobacco, the chief food needs of the Indian corn plant are 

 nitrogen and potash, and a complete fertilizer will always produce a great 

 increase in the crop, we have never yet made an experiment in which the in- 

 creased crop paid for the outlay in fertilizer at the usual price for corn. In- 

 asmuch as the larger part of the cost of the complete fertilizer is in the nitro- 

 gen, it may be practicable to profitably use a commercial fertilizer on the 

 corn crop if the nitrogen needed is supplied from legumes or manure made 

 at home, and only acid phosphate and potash are used in the mixture applied. 

 Indian corn is one of the essentials in any rotation in American agriculture, 

 from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. It is the chief of all feed crops grown 

 in this country, and lies at the very foundation of all of our national success 

 in the production of beef and pork. We hear a great deal of wise talk about 

 the "great corn belt/' and some seem to suppose that success with the corn 

 crop is confined to the area included in the black prairie lands of Illinois, 

 Missouri, Iowa and Kansas, and nothing is more common than to hear poor 

 farmers excuse themselves by saying that it is no longer possible, in the East, 

 to compete with the Western farmer, in the production of corn or wheat. 

 The fact is that good farmers all along the Middle and South Atlantic coast 

 are growing as good corn and wheat crops as the Western farmers, and at a 

 better profit, because of their nearness to the great markets. In the 

 wheat growing section of Eastern Maryland a good farm rotation has brought 

 up the production of wheat from 10 or 12 bushels per acre, to 35, 40 and 

 even 50 bushels per acre. At the same time the great wheat farms of the 

 Dakotas have decreased in productiveness, for the reason that one-crop farm-, 

 ing will fail anywhere. The Dakota wheat growers are as straight on the 

 road to "old fields" as ever were the tobacco and cotton growers of the South. 

 The exuberant fertility of their soil may delay the final failure, but it will 

 surely come unless better methods are used. Then, too, with the Indian 

 corn crop. Recently, in Illinois, premiums were awarded to 

 corn crops of 55 bushels per acre, while in poor old Virginia, North Carolina 

 and South Carolina good farmers are growing from 80 to 163 bushels of corn 

 per acre. The greatest corn crop ever grown, not, however, an evidence of 



(146) 



