The Story of the Soil Part 24

"I am glad you have told me so much," she replied. "I am deeply interested in what you have been saying. I never realized that agriculture could involve such very important questions in regard to our national prosperity. I only know that our farm has furnished us with a living but there has been very little of what you call profit. We children could never have gone away to school except that we were enabled to take advantage of some unusual opportunities. My brother almost earned his expenses as commissary in a boarding club at college. He felt that he could not come home for Thanksgiving because he had a chance to earn something and I have missed him so much. Most farmers get barely enough from their farms in these parts to furnish them a modest living and pay their taxes."

"That reminds me of your statement that farming is the last thing that you would expect anyone to undertake. In a large sense that is in accordance with the history of all great agricultural countries.

After the great wave of easy spoilation of the land has pa.s.sed, and the farmers reach a condition under which they need most of what they produce for their own consumption, the parasites are themselves forced to produce their own food. The lands become divided into smaller holdings and the agricultural inhabitants increase rapidly in proportion to the urban population which must depend upon the profits from secondary pursuits for a living. Thus ninety-five per cent. of the three hundred million people of India belong princ.i.p.ally to the agricultural cla.s.ses, and the farms of India average about two to three acres in size. Farming there is in no sense a profit-yielding business, but it is only a means of existence. The people live upon what they raise, so far as they can, although, as you must know, India is almost never free from famine.

In Russia, the situation is but little better, for famine follows if the yield of wheat falls two bushels below the average. Special agents of the Bureau of Statistics of the United States Department of Agriculture report that at least one famine year occurs in each five year period, and sometimes even two; that the famine years are so frequent they are recognized as a permanent feature of Russian agriculture."

"But couldn't those poor starving people do some other kind of work and thus earn a better living?" asked Adelaide.

"No. Agriculture is the only hope," said Percy. "The soil is the breast of Mother Earth, from which her children must always draw their nourishment, or perish. It is the 'last thing,' as you truly said. Aside from hunting and fis.h.i.+ng, there is no source of food except the soil, and, when this is insufficient for the people who produce it in the country, G.o.d pity the poor people who live in the cities. But let us not talk of this more. I ought not to have taken up the time of our ride through this beautiful scenery with a subject which tends always toward the serious. The leaves are all gone in New England, but here they have only taken on their most beautiful colors. 'What is so rare as a day in June?' could now well be answered, 'a day in November in Piedmont, Virginia.'"

"Do you know if your father received a letter for me from the chemist to whom I sent the soil samples?"

"Yes, it came in Wednesday's mail, and there is a letter from the University of Illinois and two others that Grandma says must be from a lady. Papa says he is anxious to know what results would be found in the chemist's report. May I listen while you tell papa about it?

Indeed, I am extremely interested to know if anything can be done to make our farm produce such crops as it used to when grandmother was a little girl."

"Still I fear you will find it a very tiresome subject," said Percy.

"It is, as a rule, not an easy matter to adopt a system of permanent improvement on land that has been depleted by a century or more of exhaustive husbandry. but you will be very welcome not only to listen but to counsel also. My mother can measure difficulties in advance better than most men; and I believe it is true that women will deliberately plan and follow a course involving greater hards.h.i.+p and privation than men would undertake. I cannot conceive of any man doing what my mother has done for me."

Adelaide glanced at Percy as he spoke of his mother. Something in his words or voice seemed to reveal to her a depth of feeling, a wealth of affection akin to reverence, such as she had never recognized before.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE ULTIMATE COMPARISON

WILKES was at the side gate to meet Adelaide and Percy, and the grandmother stood at the door as they reached the veranda.

"Lucky for us you got back before the Thanksgiving sc.r.a.ps are all gone," she said to Percy, "but I suppose even our Thanksgiving fare will be poor picking after you've been living in Was.h.i.+ngton and Boston."

"Even the Thanksgiving dinner on the boat was not equal to this,"

said Percy, as they sat down to the table loaded with such an abundance of good things as is rarely seen except on the farmer's table. The "sc.r.a.ps," if such there were, had no appearance of being left-overs, and there was monster turkey, browned to perfection and sizzling hot, placed before Mr. West ready for the carving knife.

Percy had opened the letter from the chemist, but said to Mr. West that it would take him an hour or more to compute the results to the form of the actual elements and reduce them to pounds per acre in order to make possible a direct comparison between the requirements of crops, on the one hand, and the invoice of the soil and application of plant food in manure and fertilizers, on the other hand.

"Please let me help you make the computations," said Adelaide, much to the surprise of her parents, who knew that she took no interest in affairs pertaining to farming. "I like mathematics and will promise not to make any mistakes if you will tell me how to do some of the figuring."

"Thank you," said Percy. "With your help it will take only half the time that I should require alone."

This proved to be correct, for in half an hour after supper they had the results in simplified form. Even the mother and grandmother joined the circle as Percy began to discuss the results with Mr.

West

"Now here is the invoice," said Percy, "of the surface soil from an acre of land where we collected the first composite sample,--the land which you said had not been cropped since you could remember.

This soil contains plant food as follows:

1,440 pounds of nitrogen 380 pounds of phosphorus 15,760 pounds of pota.s.sium 3,340 pounds of magnesium 10,420 pounds of calcium

"I'd like to know how these amounts compare with what your Illinois soil contains," said Mr. West.

"We have several different kinds of soil in Illinois," replied Percy. "The common corn belt prairie soil is called brown silt loam.

It contains, as an average, 5000 pounds of nitrogen and 1200 pounds of phosphorus, or nearly four times as much of each of those elements as this Virginia soil which you say is too poor to cultivate.

"I wrote to the Illinois Experiment Station before I left Was.h.i.+ngton to see if I could get the average composition of the heavier prairie soil, which occupies the very flat areas that were originally swampy, and one of the letters you had received for me gives 8000 pounds of nitrogen and 2000 pounds of phosphorus as the general average for that soil. That is our most productive land, and it contains about five times as much of these two very important elements as your poorest land.

"Our more common Illinois prairie contains about 35,000 pounds of pota.s.sium, 9,000 pounds of magnesium, and I 1,000 pounds of calcium.

This is more than twice as much pota.s.sium and nearly three times as much magnesium as in your poorest land, but the calcium content is about the same in your soil as in ours. However, as you will remember, your soil is distinctly acid and consequently markedly in need of lime, the magnesium and calcium evidently being contained in part in the form of acid silicates with no carbonates; whereas, our brown silt loam is a neutral soil and our black clay loam contains much calcium carbonate, the same compound as pure limestone."

"I am anxious to know about our best land," said Mr. West. "What did the chemist find in the soil from the slope where we get the best corn after breaking up the old pastures?"

"He found the following amounts in the surface soil," said Percy.

800 pounds of nitrogen

1,660 pounds of phosphorus

34, 100 pounds of pota.s.sium

8,500 pounds of magnesium

13,100 pounds of calcium

"Rich in everything but nitrogen," Percy continued, "richer than our common prairies in phosphorus and calcium, and nearly as rich in pota.s.sium and magnesium; but very, very poor in nitrogen. Legume plants ought to grow well on that land, because the minerals are present in abundance, and, while lack of nitrogen in the soil will limit the yield of all grains and gra.s.ses, there is no nitrogen limit for the legume plants if infected with the proper nitrogen-fixing bacteria, provided, of course, that the soil is not acid. You will remember, however, that even this sloping land is more or less acid, although here and there we found pieces of undecomposed limestone. With a liberal use of ground limestone, any legumes suited to this soil and climate ought to grow luxuriantly on those slopes."

"That reminds me that we are greatly troubled with j.a.pan clover on those slopes," said Mr. West. "Of course it makes good pasture for a few months, but it doesn't come so early in the spring as blue gra.s.s and it is killed with the first heavy frost in the fall. We like blue gra.s.s much better for that reason, but when we seed down for meadow and pasture, the j.a.pan clover always crowds out the timothy and blue gra.s.s on those slopes."

"And when you plow under the j.a.pan clover, you get one or two good crops of grain," said Percy, "because this clover has stored up some much needed nitrogen and the soil is rich in all other necessary elements. Have you ever tried alfalfa on that kind of land? That is a crop that ought to do well there, especially if limestone were applied."

"Yes, I have tried alfalfa," replied Mr. West, "and I tried it on a strip that ran across one of those steep slopes; but it failed completely, and, as I remember it, it was poorer on that hillside than on the more level land."

"Did you inoculate it?" Percy asked.

"Inoculate it? No. I didn't do anything to it, but just sow it the same as I sow red clover."

"What does it mean to inoculate it?" asked Adelaide.

"It means to put some bugs on it," said the grandmother; "some germs or microbes, or whatever they are called. Don't you remember, Adelaide, that I told you about that when I read it in the magazine a while ago? Don't you remember that somebody was making it and a man could carry enough in his vest pocket to fertilize an acre and he wanted $2 a package. Charles said that $1.50 a hundred was more than he could afford to pay for fertilizer, and he didn't care to pay $2 for a vest pocket package. Isn't that the stuff, Mr.

Johnston?"

"It listens like it, as the Swedes say," said Percy, "but the advertis.e.m.e.nts of these germ cultures put out by commercial interests are usually very misleading. The safest and best and least expensive method of inoculating a field for alfalfa is to use infested soil taken from some old alfalfa field or from a patch of ground where the common sweet clover, or mellilotus, has been growing for several years. I saw the sweet clover growing along the railroad near Montplain, and there is one patch on the roadside right where--when you enter the valley on the way to the station."

"Right where Adelaide smashed that n.i.g.g.e.r's eye with her heel and helped Mr. Johnston capture them both," broke in the grandmother.

"That's the only good thing I can say for her peg heeled shoes."