368 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



Chemical anatysis may show an abundance of plant food in it and yet it may 

 be in a very unproductive condition through lack of availability of what it 

 contains. The only way to find out what you need to buy and what you need 

 not buy is to question the soil itself by a series of experiments, as we have 

 tried to describe. The observant farmer, who wishes to avoid wasting his 

 capital in the purchase of what he does not need to buy, will make these ex- 

 periments. Those who are willing still to buy at haphazard will continue 

 their present spendthrift plan. 



23. It is evident, then, that the farmer who is to be successful in the 

 future, must be the thinking and reading farmer, and a legume farmer, for 

 in legume-growing and the feeding of live stock will be found the key to 

 prosperity, no matter whether you are growing spring wheat in the North- 

 west or winter wheat inthe Central States, or cotton in the South. The basal 

 principles of soil improvement are the same in any climate and with any 

 money crop. 



24. While the market gardener finds his best profit in a very lavish 

 use of commercial fertilizers for his early crops, he will find, no less than 

 the general farmer, that success with them depends largely on his keeping 

 up the humus content of his soil, by the same means the farmer must adopt, 

 the growing of legumes. The Southern market gardener has here a great 

 advantage over those in the North, from the fact that his crops are gotten 

 off early in the summer and his longer season enables him to grow the annual 

 legumes as a succession crop on his heavily enriched acres, and to thus produce 

 an immense amount of stock feeding material. Every Southern market 

 gardener then, should be also a stock feeder, either of dairy animals, if his 

 location will make them profitable, or of beef animals. In this way he can 

 not only largely increase his profits, and be ready in times of a serious glut 

 in the market to use certain crops as stock food, but he will also be enabled 

 to raise a large quantity of manure, and we have noticed that the truck farm- 

 ers who use the most animal manures in connection with commercial fer- 

 tilizers are, as a rule, the most successful in the production of superior crops, 

 and their soil gets more independent of drought conditions through the 

 humus-making capacity of the home-made manures. While with most crops 

 of the market garden the commercial fertilizers and legumes will bring fine 

 crops, such crops as cabbage and lettuce, and cucumbers and melons are very 

 much superior when they have some stable manure also. 



25. Unless aided by the humus-making legumes and the humus-making 

 manures, the heavy applications of complete fertilizers in market gardening 

 will seldom have their best effect. The man in the South who simply grows 

 a sale crop of corn after his early truck crops in order to get the full returns 



