18 massachusetts horticultural society. 



The Modern Idea of Plant Feeding. 



It is admitted that fertility or plant food is the corner-stone o£ 

 agriculture, as agriculture is the corner-stone of all other industries. 

 Fertility, that is available plant food, is what nature or man prepares 

 for plants which are now grown as food crops for the support of 

 humanity. It goes without saying that living, growing crops, 

 like living, growing animals, must be supplied with food, either 

 through long accumulations and natural processes, or by the skill of 

 man. 



Formerly, the practice was to manure the soil in order to restore 

 lost fertility and to supply, by guess work, deficiencies in the soil, 

 as ascertained by a chemical or a crop analysis of the soil. This 

 method is not now regarded as a practical solution of the problem, 

 for neither chemical analysis nor the growing of crops can be relied 

 upon as a true guide to its enrichment. The chemical analysis of 

 the soil discloses too much that is misleading, and the growing, or 

 even the matured crop, too little that is conclusive. 



Modern practice teaches that it is not the soil but the crop that 

 we should first consider. In a word, we have turned from the soil, 

 which cannot positively answer, full though it is of life, to the lix-ing 

 crop which can; so today we feed the crop rather than the soil. 

 In the modern sense, therefore, the farmer is a manufacturer and 

 the soil is his machine, into which he puts plant food and out of 

 which, by the aid of nature, including the bacteria and other seen 

 and unseen forces, combined with his own efforts, he takes his 

 product at harvest time. If the soil machine is a good one, that is 

 of the right texture and retentive of plant food, full of active nitrify- 

 ing bacteria or "yeast," so much the better. If it has a balance of 

 crop-producing power to its credit, we seek to preserve that balance 

 for an emergency, as the prudent man preserves a balance in the 

 bank in case of panic. 



In stock feeding, we chiefly concern ourselves with a study of 

 the animal and its needs. So, in plant feeding we must make an 

 intelligent study of the needs of the living crop, and in the study of 

 this problem we must also study the soil, its latent or })otential 

 fertility, its physical and chemical characteristics, and, particularly, 



