152 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



While we ma}" make the climate in a small way, we may 

 take th(^ soil in the state in which we find it, and change it, 

 and there man's influence is most pronounced. Any soil 

 that contains less of any plant food than is needed is abso- 

 lutely sterile, no matter how rich it may be in the other 

 ingredients; that is, if it has 12 i)er cent available potash 

 and 12 per cent phosphoric acid, and has no nitrogen, you 

 cannot grow any crop. The plant eats the soil, practically, 

 in which it is placed, and the steer does not ; and that is 

 where the difficulty of the problem comes in. If you could 

 put a steer in a stall and feed it partly on the stall and partly 

 on the crib, the problem of feeding it would be very com- 

 plicated. You would have to know how much nourishment 

 it was getting out of the crib and how much out of the stall. 

 And you might have a field with 100 tons of plant food in it, 

 but if the plant cannot get at it, it will starve. These are 

 the fundamental principles of feeding plants a balanced 

 ration, just as you would feed a steer. 



We have shown in our experiments that a plant feeds, 

 as a plant, according to the amount of the loose, available, 

 essential plant food which it can get, — that is a fundamen- 

 tal proposition ; but if a plant can get but a little bit of an 

 essential plant food, not enough to make a crop, it may feed 

 on the other food to a certain extent. If the nitrogen is 

 deficient, we find exactly what Dr. Jordan has said. When 

 you find this, you must balance your ration in such a way 

 that the least abundant plant food in the soil will be in- 

 creased to a sufiicient quantity to make a normal crop. 

 That is what the farmer wants to do. He doesn't want to 

 rob his son or his grandson, but he wants to feed his crop 

 in a way to be most economically produced. And he ought 

 to know something about the relative abundance of the mate- 

 rials in his soil. I won't go into the subject as to how that 

 is to be found out. I know the experiment station cannot 

 analyze the soil of every farm in the State. The farmer 

 must take part in the work, as has been suggested. 



I will tell you what we have done in the south. There 

 the problem is quite simple, because the soil in the south 

 is almost pure sand, — contains scarcely any plant food at 



