148 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



Phelps has now met with a similar experience at the Storrs 

 station in Connecticut, the corrective influence of the lime 

 applied being most marked, in the test of the past season. 

 Should the price of sulfate of ammonia drop at any time 

 much below the price of nitrate of soda, this material will in 

 all likelihood find its way extensively into our commercial 

 fertilizers, as it does into certain mixtures so widely used in 

 Europe at the present time. If such should be the case, it 

 will behoove the farmers of certain parts of New England to 

 pay more attention to the lime requirement of their soils 

 than would otherwise be the case. 



Having spoken of the tendency of sulfate of ammonia to 

 seriously aggravate the condition of acid soils or those defi- 

 cient in carbonate of lime, it should be stated that nitrate 

 of soda has the opposite tendency, the residual soda left in 

 the soil after the removal of the nitric acid by the plant 

 tending to counteract, though in a limited degree, the pre- 

 vailing acidity of the soil. For this reason, nitrate of soda 

 is a particularly safe source of nitrogen for use in most of 

 our soils where carbonate of lime is deficient. Upon very 

 compact, clayey soil, which tends to bake, nitrate of soda, 

 if used consecutively without carbonate of lime, may so 

 increase this tendency as to work great injury to the soil, 

 as was well illustrated at Poppelsdorf, near Bonn on the 

 Rhine, Germany, in experiments being conducted by AYolt- 

 mann in the summer of 1898. 



Aside from the influence of nitrate of soda and sulfate of 

 ammonia upon the chemical reaction of the soils so far as 

 concerns their alkalinity or acidity (which is a potent factor 

 in the growth of many plants even in the case of upland 

 soils), there is another point that must not be omitted. 

 Reference is now made to the possible action of the soda as 

 a direct or indirect manure. If the soda is of agricultural 

 value in either or both of these ways, then we have a still 

 stronger reason for using nitrate of soda as a source of nitro- 

 gen in preference to sulfate of ammonia, unless the cost of 

 nitrogen in the latter substance drops materially below its 

 price as nitrate. 



Atterberg * conducted experiments in ' ' quartz sand " in 



* Deut. landw. Presse 18 (1891), No. 102, p. 1035. 



