6 
Bulletin 99 . 
These, then, were the conditions under which our agriculture 
began. It is a well known fact, that the farmers very soon began 
to feel the need of doing something to keep up the yield, particularly 
of the cereals, because this was the first class of crops raised. 
THE COST OE GROWING CROPS. 
In these early days the soil bore the burden or cost of raising 
the crops, and the farmer made no estimate of this; even now he 
seldom takes this factor into account. A ton of alfalfa, perhaps 
one of his cheaper crops, is charged with the rent of the land, cost 
of irrigating, cutting and stacking. There is seldom any question 
as to whether the ton of alfalfa has cost the land any of its fer¬ 
tility or not. The time has already arrived when these questions 
of cost in soil fertility must be taken into account. I have taken 
alfalfa because it is our popular forage plant, and very justly so. 
I shall use figures in this calculation which I published ten years 
ago, but they are the same facts, just as true as they were then. 
The cost of the ton of alfalfa in soil fertility will be best understood 
if we consider it to have been sold off of the ranch. With the ton 
of alfalfa hay, cut when the plants were in half bloom, there would 
be sold fifty-five pounds of potash, ten pounds of phosphoric acid, 
and fifty-two pounds of nitrogen, some of which, however, came 
from the atmosphere. I do not know how much of it really came 
from the air and how much from the soil, but I will assume that 
one-half of it came from each, and we will use the trade values for 
these substances as given for 1904. The fifty-five pounds of potash, 
at 5 cents per pound, is worth $2.75; the phosphoric acid, in cotton 
seed meal, etc., is quoted at 4 cents, and the 10 pounds in the ton of 
alfalfa is worth 40 cents. Considering that one-half of the nitrogen 
is obtained from the soil, we will have 26 pounds of nitrogen to 
charge against it at 17 cents per pound, or $4.42, a total cost in soil 
fertility, which would have cost, bought in the market in 1904, 
$7.57. As it may be better understood by some, I will express it 
as the cost of raising four tons of alfalfa hay per acre, which would 
be $30.28. 
The sugar beet is a crop which is now grown on a large scale 
in several sections of the state. The crop harvested in this im¬ 
mediate neighborhood in 1904 was 80,000 tons. What was the 
money value of the phosphoric acid, potash and nitrogen removed 
from the soil by this crop at the current prices of these substances, 
i. e., 4 cents per pound for phosphoric acid, 5 cents per pound for 
potash, and 17 cents per pound for nitrogen. These are the values 
adopted by some of the Eastern Experiment Stations and would be 
too low for our market. The 80,000 tons of beets would contain 
331 tons of potash, worth $31,100; 71 tons of phosphoric acid, 
worth $5,680; 160 tons of nitrogen, worth $54,400; a total of 
