How to grow one hundred bushels of corn per acre on worn soils

Front matter

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Introduction

TO FIRST EDITION

ABANDONED farms and decreasing production of our farm lands is the present-day menace of our country. Increasing population, decreasing fertility of our soils and fewer acres of new land opened for settlement, brings us each day nearer the solution of the problem, how shall we feed our people?

The answer to the question is the " Renovation of Worn-out Soils " so that they will again produce as they did when our forefathers subdued them from the wilderness that held them in subjection for centuries.

Renovation of the Soil — what does it mean?

It means to make the soil over again, to restore it to freshness and vigor — to renew it.

Too many American farmers have gone upon the principle that their land will never wear out. Their fathers entered upon land covered with the virgin forest, rich in all the elements that make good soil ; the forests were subdued and the land brought into cultivation; bountiful crops were produced because the soil was well supplied with humus, nitrogen, potash and other elements found in first class soils. Year after year bumper crops were gathered from these lands, the pioneer died, and his sons and sons' sons continued to farm these lands in

II 12 Introduction To First Edition

the same manner and with the same methods as they were farmed by the pioneer.

It did not seem possible to the sons and sons' sons that these rich lands could ever reach the point of exhaustion, or that the time would come when they must be farmed and treated in a different manner than when they were first cleared and planted, yet that very time has come to millions of acres of American soils.

Millions of acres of our land that once produced from seventy-five to one hundred bushels of corn per acre will not now produce twenty bushels to the acre. These acres have gone into " agricultural bankruptcy."

Being confronted with this condition, what can we do to remedy it? Is there a remedy and is the remedy a sure and quick one ? The remedy must be quick, for we cannot wait fifty years as England did to restore our soils.

The purpose of this book is to give the remedy and to prove that it is a sure and quick one.

CHAPTER XI. Alfalfa 113

CHAPTER XH.

Sweet Clover 123

CHAPTER Xin.

Red Clover 129

CHAPTER XIV.

The Author's Method of Restoring Worn andWorn-out Soils. 137

CHAPTER XV.

King Corn 145

CHAPTER XVI.

The Culture of Corn 159

CHAPTER XVII.

Sweet Corn 165

CHAPTER XVIII.

A Chapter of Don't Forgets I7S

CHAPTER XIX.

Conclusion 185

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Frontispiece 2

" The Clearin' " 6

The Original Soil Builders in the Timber Belt 18

Plowing Under Organic Matter 34

A Fine Crop of Organic Matter For Plowing Under 44

Nature's Plows and Cultivators at Winter Rest 50

A Double Disc Plow 54

The Spalding Deep TiUing Machine 60

Plowing Under Corn Stalks With Deep TilHng Machine 64

A Fine Soil Covering 68

A Young Vetch Plant Showing Nitrogen Nodules on Its Roots 74

Vetch Plant Taken From Frozen Soil 80

A Bunch of Vetch Taken From Under Ice and Water 88

A Field of Vetch in Full Bloom 94

Vetch Stems Showing Bloom and Seed Pods 102

Vetch Plants Taken in Winter From Top of High Sand Ridge. 112

Vetch Seed, Actual Size 122

Vetch Seed, Magnified 128

A Promising Corn Field FertiHzed With Vetch 136

A Promising Potato Field Fertilized With Vetch 144

" Well ! I Wonder Which Is the Best Seed Ear " 158

Ten Good Ears of Boon County White, But Not Prize Getters. 164

A Good Type of Sweet Corn Seed, Stowell's Evergreen 174

The Farmer's Best Product If — , 184

THE ORIGINAL SOIL BUILDERS IN THE TIiMBER BELT.

Chapter I

SOIL is defined as being the upper stratum of the earth or that compound substance which furnishes nutriment to plants, or which is particularly adapted to support and nourish them.

Soil varies in depth from a few inches to several feet. Clay soils were produced, in part, by the wearing down and decomposition of rocks containing aluminous minerals, as granite. Sandy soil consists of fine particles of stone placed where found, by the washing of water. Muck soil is produced by the decay of large quantities of vegetation.

Clay and sandy soils were originally improved and made rich by the addition for centuries of vegetable matter such as leaves, weeds and other vegetation.

We agree with him who said " that the condition of the soil is of more importance than its character." Any kind of soil, whether clay, sandy or muck, can be made to produce large crops if put in proper condition.

While it is true that clay or heavy soils have more of the elements of plant growth in them, yet sandy or muck soils by proper treatment will produce as much, if not more, than the clay or heavy soils.

In life's battles the " knowing how " is the entering wedge that opens the way to success. So it is in the treatment of the soils, the " knowing how " to put them in condition is the secret of success in growing crops.

The " whip and spur " method of farming, s<3 long practiced in the United States, by which our soils have been subjected to the process of getting all you can out of them, without the return of anything to maintain or increase fertility, has so exhausted vast areas of our soils that they no longer produce paying crops.

Any soil that will not produce paying crops may be justly termed a worn-out soil. These worn-out soils abound in all parts of our land. Even the rich corn belt is not immune from the curse of worn-out soils.

As a rule a greedy husbandry or a sordid tillage has been the producer of worn-out soils, although the deceptive theory of crop rotation has been to a degree a producer of them ; for crop rotation alone will not maintain soil fertility. It is but a stimulant.

Worn-out soils being so extensive, then, has not their restoration become the vital problem of the hour?

It is appalling in going over the country to see so many farmers so treating their lands as to bring them each day nearer the doom that hangs over all mistreated lands, " the abandoned farm."

Not one farmer in ten is giving his land a chance. Not one in ten seems to know how to build up his soil, or if he does, he seems to be going on the principle that he can get enough from his land to support him during his lifetime and does not care for his posterity or future generations.

He is like an ex-governor of a great state who spent his declining days on the farm which before he died was in the worst condition of any in the neighborhood. People wondered why a man whose Hfe and business in other Hnes had been so successful should allow his farm, upon which he was residing, to get into such a condition. The governor was interrogated regarding the matter and replied, " I am not farming for future generations."

But it is encouraging to see so many of our great financiers, statesmen and people in the humbler walks of life becoming interested in soil restoration. Our agricultural schools are doing a noble work along this line.

If it be true that the condition of the soil is of more importance than its character, then it is not necessary for us to go into the discussion of the relative value of the different kinds of soils, further than to say that some of the extreme sandy soils of New Jersey and Long Island have by proper treatment been transformed into the richest of soils; so have the sandy lands of Holland been made worth $3,000 per acre by proper treatment.

After thorough study, backed up by actual experiment, we make the statement that most any sandy or clay soil can be made to yield 100 bushels of corn per acre.

That this can be done, and done quickly, we have demonstrated by actual experiments.

Three elements are necessary to make good soils : Potash, phosphorus and nitrogen ; and the last mentioned, according to the best authority, is the " most precious, the most important and the most costly." It is the element soonest farmed out of fertile soils.

It is said that " nitrogen promotes growth, phosphorus produces fruitfulness and early maturity, and potash increases quality."

Most sandy, clay or heavy soils contain sufficient potash and phosphorus, but are wholly lacking in humus, organic matter and nitrogen.

One writer says that " corn, oats and wheat are made of plant food ; that they consist of ten certain elementary substances; that a ton of corn contains a ton of these plant food elements, of which only three are secured by the corn plant from air and water. The seven are taken from the soil. The three elements make up more than ninety per cent, of the corn, but the other seven are no less essential to plant growth."

The seven elements mentioned and which make up but ten per cent, of the corn crop, are generally found in sufficient quantities in all soils to last from 500 to 17,- 600 years.

The chief lack of worn-out soils is humus, organic matter and nitrogen.

Humus is the residue of decayed organic matter.

Organic matter is vegetable or animal matter, like leaves, roots, sticks, grasses, manure, straw, etc.

Therefore that which is left of organic matter after it has passed through its process of decay is humus. It appears in the soil as a dark-colored substance, and where it exists in abundance renders the soil black.

Soils originally procured their entire supply of humus and a large portion of nitrogen from decayed vegetation or organic matter, secured in their progress of formation.

Virgin soils procured their largest supply of nitrogen from the air through the work of those soil bacteria who make their homes in the root nodules of those plants known as the nitrogen-gathering plants or the legumes, and who draw for their food the nitrogen from the air, and drawing more than they need, store the surplus in the soil where it becomes available for plant food.

There are thousands of nitrogen-gathering plants, some of them being the trees of the forests.

Go into the virgin forest such as once covered the middle west — and there are some such forests existing to-day, but they are not large — and you will see between the trees, the ground covered with decayed and decaying tree trunks and limbs and a heavy coating of leaves. A large number of the trees, and much of the undergrowth of these forests, are of the legume family, or the nitrogen gatherers of the soil.

This decaying of trees and leaves, and nitrogen gathering, has been going on for hundreds of years, thus storing up a vast storehouse of precious elements of rich soil. Is it any wonder then that lands when first cleared of the virgin forest were so rich?

Continued cultivation of cleared lands without the addition of anything to reproduce these original elements has exhausted them from our soil, and until we can get them back into the soil again, our lands, lacking in these elements, will become more worthless as the years go by.

When we consider that it took centuries to put large quantities of nitrogen, organic matter and humus into our soils, it seems an impossible task to get back into these soils again within a short time the quantities of nitrogen, organic matter and humus that took so long to put there in the first instance.

Barnyard manure will put these elements back into the soil quicker than any other known agency, but this remedy is impracticable to use on a large scale, because sufficient quantities of manure cannot be obtained.

Commercial fertilizers will not do the work for the chief reason that they do not contain the humus, and organic matter, and for the further reason that the mineral matter in the soil is sufficiently dissolved by coming in contact with water and moisture to furnish the needs of plant growth. This dissolution is continued in sufficient amounts to keep up the necessary supply of minerals, and so the adding of commercial fertilizers will not, as a rule, add to the supply of plant food in the soil.

It is said that there is enough nitrogen in the air over an acre of ground to grow 75 bushels of corn per acre per year for 600,000 years, but the nitrogen is of no value to the soil unless it is drawn into it from the air, so that the plant in the soil can assimilate it into its system and thus secure the element that makes vigor of growth. But soils need humus and organic matter as well as nitrogen.

We are hearing much of the " Volusia soils," so named from a village in New York where first noticed.

A writer speaking of these soils says : " They are worn and unproductive, extend from the Hudson river westward across the state through Pennsylvania into Ohio. Ten million acres, most part too poor to grow clover without fertilizers, are unfit for cultivation. They once produced good crops ; fine old houses and barns occupy them, which are now unoccupied. These lands dressed with liberal quantities of stable manure produce good crops. It is said that if these soils are drained, supplied with organic matter and their acidity corrected so that bacteria can thrive in them, they become again productive. In fine, these soils need drainage, organic matter in the form of manure, green crops plowed under and application of lime. It is said that these lands cannot get manure because they will not support stock."

Are not millions of acres of our soil in other states of the Union becoming Volusiaized? And is not the secret of their restoration contained in the application to them of drainage and organic matter ?

Chapter II

NO soil can be put in good tilth without thorough drainage.

As well try to grow most crops with " wet feet " as to attempt to grow them on hot desert soils. Ill both instances they will die, because they are out of their proper environment.

Moisture you must have to grow crops, but moisture overdone, un-does.

It is as necessary for plant roots to breathe as human beings; shut off soil ventilation and you shut off free oxygen from reaching the plant roots, and the plant dies.

There can be no soil ventilation when the soil is cold, compact and saturated with water. Hence the importance of drainage, and thorough drainage.

Drainage is of more importance to worn-out soils than it is to new soils. New soils are porous and water will easily percolate through them.

Worn-out soils are hard, compact and non-porous. They are absolutely incapable of affording ventilation to plant roots.

Drainage is one of the most effective methods of getting this needful soil ventilation.

The more drainage in worn-out soils the better; no matter whether water is on the land or not, put into them

27, as much ditching as you can. There is no danger of getting too many drains.

Ditches give the proper temperature to the soil, promote soil ventilation and conserve soil moisture.

Most heavy soils are compact and cold, the temperature in them is too low, and the soil ventilation too inadequate to be conducive to plant growth. There is no room in them for plant roots to perform their proper functions.

Lands improperly drained are slow in drying out, and seeding them is delayed beyond the proper season for planting, thus giving a shorter growing season.

It takes more labor to till cold, compact, non-drained soils. All kinds of soils are benefited by drainage.

Drainage, figuratively speaking, opens up the pores of the soils so that water from rains and snows will quickly enter and percolate through them, down to the drains rather than over the surface, preventing to a large extent the disastrous results of soil washing.

Drainage will also prevent the standing of water in the low places of our farms and thus eliminate the soured, heavy soils found in such spots.

The greatest advantage to be obtained by plenty of drainage is the putting of the soil in that condition of porosity, deepness and pulverization, as will prevent droughts as well as floods.

In a thoroughly ditched soil, plant roots at once strike deep where they are safe from the onsets of summer droughts.

The experience of years has been that well-drained soils produce better crops in wet or dry seasons than the undrained soils, and experience has also shown that worn soils cannot be reclaimed until they are first well ditched.

In the light of this experience, I cannot too strongly impress upon my readers that we must first thoroughly drain our soils if we would build them up to a fertile stage.

All drains should be so constructed as to be open at both ends, as a drain so constructed will act like a chimney; the air will go into one end and out the other, and the air thus passing through the drain in dry weather is condensed into moisture, which is thrown out into the soil, made porous by drain construction, and thus furnishes moisture to the plant roots.

The source of all drains should terminate in some fence row close to the fence, the tile brought up to the surface of the ground and properly screened to prevent animals, weeds, sticks, or foreign substances from entering the drain.

The mouth of drains should be kept open at all times and screened in the same manner. Such a ditch is the most valuable asset on the farm.

Drains should be constructed of not less than six-inch tile, and need not ordinarily exceed four feet in depth, but no fixed rule as to depth of drain can be given, as the undulating character of the soil and the outlet must govern the depth. Where lands are too deeply tiled there is likely to be a waste of water.

In constructing drains, the idea of soil ventilation must be kept in mind, so it does not matter in all cases whether a drain will carry water or not; it is useful if it only affords ventilation, provided both ends of the drain are open.

The Soils and Crops department of Purdue University Experiment station, in their experiments of tiled and untiled lands, show an average yield of 76.1 bushels of corn per acre on tiled land and 61.8 bushels per acre on untiled land, or a difference of 14.3 bushels in favor of the tiled land.

This is a money value of $7.15 per acre with corn selling at fifty cents per bushel.

This experiment speaks volumes for drainage and shows that a system of good drainage can soon be paid for out of the increased yield of crops which it will produce.

At a cost of less than six dollars per acre the author constructed a mile of eight and ten inch cement tile drain on his " Vetchfalfa Farm," and the larger portion of same was of ten inch tile placed at an average depth of six feet in order to secure an outlet.

This system of drainage installed by the author consists of one main line or outlet of ten inch tile, running through the center of the farm nearly one-half mile in length, with manholes provided with iron tops with openings for admission of water and air. Laterals are run out from both sides of the main line to the outer boundary lines of the farm and brought up to the surface of the ground close up to the fences and the opening screened to keep out trash or animals.

This method of tile drainage construction enables a surplus of water to quickly pass away and affords a perfeet system of air passage in dry weather, the advantages of which has heretofore been shown.

In this system of drainage, cement tile were used because such tile are more porous than other kinds, and water and air readily pass through them.

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Chapter III

IT is of great importance to crop production that there be plenty of organic matter in the soil. I have shown why newly cleared soils were so rich in fertility — they are rich in organic matter.

Good authorities say that organic matter in the soil absorbs three times as much water as its weight in clay, and retains it twice as long, and five times as much as sand and retains it five times as long.

There is no danger of getting too much organic matter into the soil. An acre of land twelve inches deep weighs 2,000 tons. It would take 100 tons of organic matter plowed under every two or three years to make onetwentieth part of the 2,000 tons.

For a soil to be in its highest stage of fertility it must contain germ life and bacteria. These are always found in their greater abundance within the first six inches of soil, and they get their food from organic matter.

As they cannot get any feeding matter from the minerals of the soil, they cannot exist in any soil lacking in organic matter.

In virgin soils they are found in abundance, where they reach the highest stage of development.

This germ life and bacteria in the soil play an important part in preparing the soil, or putting it in the proper condition for plant growth.

They aire the little constant workers in Nature's laboratory, that compound and distribute the substances needed for plant food. They cleanse the soil of its offensive accumulations and are one of the best aids to successful agriculture.

It has been said that land without organic matter is but the skeleton of the soil, and that the organic matter makes the flesh.

The system of farming in vogue in the United States for the past one hundred years has farmed out of the soils most all the organic matter originally in them. It has stripped the body of its flesh and nothing but the skeleton remains.

For instance, the average farmer will one year plant a field in corn. The next season he will break, rake and burn every stalk and put it in corn again. In the fall he will sow wheat in the corn. The next season he will break the ground and put in wheat again; perhaps he will sow clover in the wheat in the spring. If the clover is a good stand, the next season he will remove from the field not only the first clover crop but also the seed crop, and the following spring break up for corn again, and continue on and on this same process.

This is regarded good farming. They tell us it is crop rotation, and builds up our farms. Yet I say to you, that under this very system our farms have grown and are growing poorer every year. That the organic matter in the soil is becoming less and less, and why?

Because not sufficient organic matter is being added to the soil to keep up the necessary supply.

The corn stalks were in the majority of cases burned and destroyed; the wheat stubble with its roots was insignificant. Both crops of clover were removed, leaving nothing but stubble and roots, which are insignificant.

In all these years more organic matter was removed than added to the soil, and the supply of humus was gradually being exhausted.

What about the fields that have been planted each year to corn for ten, fifteen, twenty and even seventy years, and stalks removed and burned each year? And what about the many fields rotated with corn, oats and wheat only, and the stalks and stubbles in most cases burned?

Vegetable matter destroyed by burning resolves into air from 90 to 99 per cent, of its organic parts.

If this be true, then the value of the ashes obtained from burning vegetation is too small to be considered.

Standing in the receding twilight of an April evening, I have seen the entire visible horizon of the famous Wabash Valley aglow with the reflection from the fires of burning corn stalks, raked up into windrows, from thousands of acres of soil, that needed the humus, potash and nitrogen abounding in these stalks, but which was going up in smoke, to be lost forever to these acres of soil that are fast losing their fertility. As I looked upon this thoughtless and almost criminal destruction of soil fertility, I saw in my imagination pictured in the reflected light upon the sky, pictures of

" Agricultural Bankruptcy " and " Abandoned Farms," and as I beheld this pictured doom of the American farm, I exclaimed : When, oh when, will the American farmer come into a realization of this awful destruction of soil wealth?

One day in the spring of 1909, while directing some work on my farm, I noticed to the north great clouds of smoke and flame covering a large area. I wondered what could be burning. The conflagration was too large for burning corn stalks or buildings. Later in the day I learned that a farmer (?) had touched a match to a forty-acre field of dry Big English clover grown on the ground the previous season and left uncut.

When I learned of this conscienceless destruction of soil fertility, I said in my wrath : The match in the hands of the American farmer is a menace to the farm.

In the growing of this clover and leaving it uncut to cover the ground through the leaching season of fall, winter and spring, this farmer had taken the first and an important lesson in soil restoration. But his second and best lesson was left unlearned.

Think what it would have meant to that soil and that farmer had that splendid crop of organic matter, so full of the precious soil elements, nitrogen and humus, been turned under by the plow.

Think how the little rootlets of the corn would have reveled in this mass of organic matter, mixed with the soil and drawing from it into the corn system those elements that make that sturdiness of growth that produces a heavy paying crop on the farm.

Again, think of the financial loss to that farmer from the destruction of the clover. For it has been estimated that the potash, phosphoric acid and nitrogen in a ton of clover hay is worth $17.57 for manure. There v^ras not less than a ton of clover hay on each acre of the forty-acre field, worth a total of $702.80 plowed under for manure.

The farmer's only excuse for burning was that the clover was so heavy that»it could not be plowed under. This we dispute. The right kind of a double-disc plow would have turned it under nicely. Of course the plow would have occasionally choked up, and it would have taken longer to plow the field, but it would have been well worth the time and extra labor, for the farmer would have secured for this field a fertility that would have yielded him large returns.

The same excuse that this farmer made for burning the clover, is made for burning corn stalks; that is, they cannot be plowed under so as not to interfere with the cultivation of corn and other crops. This we also dispute. We have turned under the rankest kind of growth of corn stalks that never were pastured, with an ordinary walking plow and log chain. Of course, some stalks were left sticking out of the ground and in the cultivation of crops an occasional hill of corn was jerked out of the ground by the cultivator catching on the stalks insufficiently plowed under, but what of that? The loss of a few hills of corn is nothing compared to the great loss of the stalks if destroyed by burning.

An instance is given of two farmers owning farms side by side, one of whom always gathered up his corn stalks and burned them. The other never allowed a stalk or a straw to be burned on his land. After fifteen years the former farmer's farm yielded fifteen bushels of corn less to the acre than when he first commenced farming it, while the latter's farm produced as well as it did at the beginning of the fifteen years.

One hundred bushels of corn contains about loo pounds of nitrogen, 17 pounds of phosphorus and 19 pounds of potassium.

The stalks upon which the 100 bushels of corn grew contain about 48 pounds of nitrogen, 6 pounds of phosphorus and 52 pounds of potassium. All these elements in the stalks have a money value of $11.04.

These elements in the corn itself are lost to the soil if the corn be sold, but that in the stalks can be saved to the soil if the stalks are not burned but are plowed under.

In the black prairies of Illinois and Iowa and the rich river bottom lands of Indiana, are vast acres of land that used to produce an average crop of sixty or more bushels of corn to the acre. The average is now less than forty bushels to the acre.

The virgin richness of these lands could have been continued simply by the plowing under of the corn stalks grown on them.

The American farmer must learn the lesson of getting organic matter into his soil or his farm is doomed.