27 
1912. 
USE OF ROCK PHOSPHATE IN ILLINOIS. 
Changes in Western Farm Practice. 
The average Illinois farmer knows very little about 
commercial fertilizers. The occasional reference to 
them in his western agricultural journal has had but 
passing interest for him, as he had not the least idea 
that his land would ever require the application of 
chemicals of any kind. Even the use of lime is some¬ 
thing unknown to him so far as his own soil is con¬ 
cerned, and his knowledge of building up the land 
extends but little beyond the use of stable manure 
and Red clover. To his credit be it said, however, 
that of recent years he has paid closer attention to 
these two things, and as a consequence there has been 
a more systematic use of both. Greater areas have 
been seeded each year to clover, and there has been 
a steadily increasing sale of manure spreaders. The 
younger generation of farmers are more wideawake to 
the importance of conserving the soil fertility; to sup¬ 
plying humus; and to adding something to the store 
of plant food, instead of gradually but surely deplet¬ 
ing the supply, as their fathers did before them. 
With the exception of a scattered few in each com¬ 
munity who have read the bulletins from our State 
experiment station, and who are close students of the 
best agricultural literature of the day, the real science 
of soil building is something of which the average 
western farmer has but little knowledge. His idea is 
that plenty of manure and clover is all the soil de¬ 
mands, and a rank growth of stalk and straw is to 
him all the evidence necessary that his theory is cor¬ 
rect. But the carefully worked-out experiments at our 
agricultural school have shown the benefits of a more 
properly balanced fertilizer, and here and there we 
find farmers who are 
making applications of 
phosphate to their land. 
The complaint of grain 
dealers in regard to soft 
corn at husking time, and 
the general custom of 
blaming the weather for 
all such troubles, has led 
some of the more 
thoughtful to the conclu¬ 
sion that an excess of 
nitrogen may be partly 
responsible for this. 
A horror of using acid 
phosphate, owing to the 
belief that it will make 
the soil sour, and the 
high price of ground 
none, has led some to ex- 
Deriment with the raw 
phosphate rock. Our ex-# 
periment station people 
have been advocating its 
use for a number of 
years; and tests on the 
station grounds, and also 
on farms in various parts 
of the State, appear to have demonstrated that it gives 
good results when properly applied. In my own com¬ 
munity there has been a limited use made of it. One 
man has covered half of 240-acre farm at the rate 
of 600 pounds to the acre, and expects to continue its 
use, until the entire farm has received an application 
of 1,000 pounds to the acre. This is one of the best 
farms in this section, and as good crops were always 
harvested when the season was at all favorable, the 
net results from the use of the phosphate could not 
well be determined, as there were no check plots re¬ 
served by which to make a comparison. However, Mr. 
Griswold stated that oats on the treated ground were 
superior to crops grown on adjoining farms, when the 
soil was in other respects just as good as his.* The 
conditions were not such as to favor the libefation of 
plant food from the rock, as it had been applied to 
stalk ground just previous to seeding to oats, a low- 
down broadcast oats seeder being used in the opera¬ 
tion. Clover was seeded with the oats, and the crops 
of hay and seed the following year were thought to 
be unusually good. 
The cost of the raw phosphate rock laid down at 
our station is about $8 per ton in carload lots. Appli¬ 
cations of 1,000 pounds per acre entails an expense, 
therefore, of about $4 for the fertilizer alone, and Mr. 
Griswold figures that the increase in crops, to say 
nothing about the improvement in quality, would not 
have to be very great to insure a return of his money. 
J. W. Brown, one of our leading bankers, and at 
the same time one of our most progressive farmers, 
has been making applications of the raw rock to his 
land, and his conclusions are same as Mr. Gris¬ 
wold’s. He considers it has benefited his soil, and 
that each year’s crop will be able to draw some plant 
the: rural, new-vorkkk 
food from it, as the decomposition of organic matter 
sets it at liberty. My own experiments with com¬ 
mercial fertilizers have been confined to the use of 
high-grade ready-mixed preparations on strawberries, 
and the results have been very gratifying. 
Macon Co., Ill. j. c. nicholls. 
HOME-BOILED LIME-SULPHUR. 
Cooking in Kettles. 
We did not have a steam outfit, so we used kettles. 
We have two kettles that will cook about 25 gallons 
each, and we used these to cook the lime-sulphur in 
and two others to heat water in, so that we could add 
boiling water as needed and not have to cool mixture 
and delay the cooking. Then by running them alter¬ 
nately and emptying one while the other was boiling 
we did not have to wait. In starting a boiling we 
used about five gallons of boiling water and added 20 
pounds of stone lime. As soon as this had begun to 
slake we added the 40 pounds of sulphur and enough 
water to keep it in a thin paste. As soon as lime 
was thoroughly slaked we added enough boiling water 
to make 25 gallons and boiled 45 minutes, adding a 
little water occasionally to make up for what boiled 
away. In emptying kettles we strained solution into 
open-headed barrels to cool and settle and then 
emptied from these into barrels for storage, testing 
each lot with the hydrometer as it went into the stor¬ 
age barrel and recording the test on the barrel. The 
tests varied from 26 to 29 degrees Beaume. In 
this way. two men could make about eight barrels of 
50 gallons each day. Counting all expenses of 
materials, freight, labor and fuel the cost of the 
homemade lime-sulphur solution was a good deal less 
than any of the brands offered on the market, and 
we think that by using a steam outfit or kettle large 
enough to boil 50 gallons at once we could reduce 
the labor cost at least one-third more. This home¬ 
made concentrate solution worked in every way as 
well as the commercial that we had used before, the 
only difference being that we had to use a little more 
of it in spraying, as we did not get it quite as strong 
as most of the commercial brands. We used the 
formula and directions given by the Geneva Experi¬ 
ment Station. Herbert p. king. 
I had considerable experience last Spring in mak¬ 
ing the homemade concentrated lime and sulphur 
mixture; we put out a good many thousand gallons 
of the stuff. The process of making is simple. We 
use a large heavy iron kettle that holds 50 gallons, 
and in that we put 25 pounds of good lime and while 
that is slaking we add 50 pounds of sulphur. We use 
the powdered commercial; this costs less and it seems 
to be just as effective. The mixture is boiled hard 
for an hour or more and is then strained into a 
barrel through a strainer that strains upward. You 
gave a cut of this strainer a few months ago, and it 
is certainly useful; it is made so that the liquid comes 
up through the fine wire and you have no trouble 
with the sediment. After the barrel stands a while 
there is some sediment in the bottom, but the barrels 
can be washed out occasionally and this sediment does 
not cause any trouble, for the clear liquid can be 
poured from the top, without disturbing the sediment. 
Made as above this preparation tests 27 to 28 on the 
Beaume scale and by the use of a table that can be 
procured from any of the experiment stations you can 
tell exactly how much of your mixture to put in in 
order to get the standard dilution. By boiling longer 
we could get nearer the 33-degree standard, but we 
reached the same end by using a little more of the 
weaker concentrate. I also used steam in making the 
mixture. We do this with a 12-horse boiler that 
goes with the engine that runs our air compressor. 
A steam boiler is not necessary, and one can make 
large quantities of the stuff in a 50-gallon kettle. We 
had no trouble with crystallization. Each barrel of 
the mixture should be tested with the hydrometer, 
marked with a piece of chalk, and then with the 
table mentioned above there is no trouble in making 
your proper dilution. This mixture can be made so 
that it will equal the 33-degree Baume test at a low 
figure per gallon. One of my neighbors made the 
mixture for quite a number of his neighbors. The 
hydrometer is absolutely necessary in order to know 
what you are doing. samuel s. guerrant. 
President Va. Horticultural Society. 
Cooking With Live Steam. 
So far as our experience goes, the best outfit for 
cooking lime-sulphur depends on the conditions that 
are to be met. If a person is making the material 
up beforehand in considerable quantity so that econ¬ 
omy in storage and cooking is a factor, then it is 
quite probable that an outfit using bottom heat or a 
kettle with a steam jacket would be preferable. This 
is on account of the fact that with such outfits the 
material can be reduced in volume in the boiling and 
thus greater densities can be economically obtained. 
If, however, storage is not so much of an item, then 
an outfit using live steam, either in wooden or iron 
vessels, will probably be more satisfactory, especially 
if exact final volumes are not demanded. The ad¬ 
vantage of such an outfit is that it is not necessary 
to provide for shrinkage water in the boiling, as the 
condensation of steam 
about offsets the loss 
during the boiling. Also, 
the steam assists great¬ 
ly in the stirring, pro¬ 
vided it is admitted into 
the cooking vessel prop¬ 
erly. To do this, it 
should enter the liquid 
as closely as possible to 
the bottom of the cook¬ 
ing vessel through a 
good-sized horizontal T 
or S with the ends 
plugged up and fine 
holes along the sides so 
as not to admit the 
steam too rapidly. Very 
large quantities can be 
cooked at one time with 
sufficient steam. 
The above facts are 
essentially as given in 
our Bulletin 99, issued 
something over a year 
ago, and we have had no 
occasion for making any 
change in the statements 
there found. This bulletin also gives a picture of a 
cooker that we have found very satisfactory, together 
with the names of manufacturers of such cookers as 
well as manufacturers of steam jacketed kettles. 
There is one thing in Bulletin 99, namely, the pro¬ 
posed use of arsenate of lime in connection with 
sulphur solutions, which our results of the past year 
indicate to be inadvisable, although as far as our re¬ 
sults are concerned up to the present season, the 
combination was quite usable. We have some very 
interesting facts with regard to arsenicals in com¬ 
bination with lime-sulphur which we expect to get 
ready for presentation in the near future. 
Pennsylvania Exp. Station. j. p. stewart. 
For some years shredded corn fodder has been a 
popular feed on farms, particularly in the West. 
Efforts have been made to put this baled fodder in 
the regular market as a hay substitute, but without 
much success. This year with a short hay crop 
chances for this seemed better, but the following note 
is probably a fair statement of the case: 
Our experience has been that New York City is the 
hardest and most difficult place to introduce anything 
now in the line of forage, that we know of. Consumers 
here want what they want and are willing to pay for it, 
and in nine cases out of ten, if Timothy hay was $40 
per ton, you could not get them to try anything new, or a 
substitute, even at one-half the price, and our experience 
has been such that it is cheaper to sell them what they 
Want at a low profit than it would be to try to educate 
them to feed a substitute, even at double the profit. For 
that reason we believe that a substitute for Timothy hay 
would be almost impossible in this city for the reason 
that before the feeder was educated, regardless of how 
good the substitute might be, the season would he prac¬ 
tically ended and a new crop in sight, and for that reason 
we do not think that we would even give it a trial. 
GEO. N. REINHARDT & CO. 
A LADIES’ AID SOCIETY IN THE CORNFIELD. Fig. 13. (See page 32.) 
