No. 4.] NITROGEN AND FERTILITY. 181 



not. To any one that has not been successful in legume 

 growing, soil inoculation may solve the problem. That 

 much profit Avill come to the average New England farmer 

 from inoculation with such crops as clover and peas that 

 have been so long grown that most land is abundantly sup- 

 plied with the proper organisms, is not to be expected. 



Will Soil Inoculation pay? 



The Department of Agriculture carried on with practical 

 farmers all over the country about 3,500 experiments with 

 cultures. Seventy-nine out of each 100 were regarded by 

 both the experimenter and the department as successful. 

 According to the department publications, there are various 

 reasons which explain the lack of success with quite a part 

 of the 21 that were unsuccessful out of each 100. 



The Maine station has experimented in the use of inocu- 

 lated seed and cultures on alfalfa, clover and peas. In the 

 case of the alfalfa, the seed was inoculated at the depart- 

 ment prior to its being sent to the experiment station. The 

 results with alfalfa, while not uniform, were in favor of the 

 inoculated seed. 



During the past twenty years the speaker has frequently 

 pulled up clover plants to look for root nodules, and he has 

 never found a clover plant in New England that was not well 

 provided with nodules. It is therefore not surprising that 

 the results of experiments in Maine soils, already provided 

 with an abundance of organisms able to form root nodules 

 on clover in somewhat acid soil, have not shown benefit from 

 the use of cultures. 



Dm"ing the past season experiments were made, on land 

 cleared from the original forest, with peas, part of which were 

 inoculated with cultures and part not. The season was a 

 phenomenally dry one in the locality in which the experi- 

 ments were carried out, and no decisive results were obtained. 



Unfortunately, the cultures sent out in 1905 by the De- 

 partment of Agriculture as well as by the commercial com- 

 panies have proven unsatisfactory. Only a small percentage 

 of the cultures sent out, so far as they were examined by 

 bacteriologists, carried the proper organisms. Cultures 



