CHAPTER III 

 SOUR SOILS 



Loss of Lime. Nature made the value 

 of land as a producer of food utterly 

 dependent upon the activity of lime, and 

 at the same time gave it some power to 

 shirk its work. In a normal soil is a per- 

 centage of lime that came from the disinte- 

 gration of rock of the region or was trans- 

 ported by action of water on a huge scale. 

 Possibly rarely would it be in insufficient 

 amount to keep a soil in a condition 

 friendly to plant life, and to feed the plant, 

 if it stayed where nature placed it and kept 

 in form available for the needs it was in- 

 tended to meet. There is land that always 

 was notably deficient in this material, and 

 there is land that was known in the early 

 history of the world's agriculture to be 

 "sour," but the troubles of our present day 

 in the case of the farming country in the 

 humid region of the United States is less 

 due to any natural absolute shortage than to 

 combination that destroys value and to 

 escape by action of water. 



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