LIZER SPECIAL
■» TU
A Farm and Home Weekly for the States of Mississippi,
Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee.
FOUNDED, 1895, BY DR. TAIT BUTLER. AT STARKVILLE, MISS.
Volume XV. No. 8 SATURDAY. FEBRUARY 26.1910. Weekly: $1 a Year.
What Fertilizer Ignorance Costs Us In a Single Year
ACCORDING TO THE latest obtainable statistics, the farmers of
six contiguous Southern States—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia,
the Csrolinas ami Virginia—spend over $50,000,000 a year for
commercial fertilizers. The total public school fund of these States
amounts to $11,000,000.
And of tiie $50,000,000 paid for fertilizers, It is not too much to
say that over $11,000,000 is wasted through ignorance of crop and
soil needs.
In other wort!*, our Ignorance Tat on the one single, solitary Item
of commercial fertilisers alone i more than the total amount we are
spending on public schools for increasing the intelligence of our chil
dren!
It tnajr be worth while to etamine the figures more in detail:
I •
Tons of t'ommer- Value at Total School
rial Fertiliser. $20 a Ton. Fund of State.
Mississippi. 187.000 $2,740,000 $1,868344
Alabama . 812.000 0,240,000 1,475,000
(ieorgia. 787.000 15,140,000 2,397,608
South Carolina . 505,000 11,300,000 1,404,074
North Carolina. 507.000 10,140.000 1,085,624
Virginia..*- 240.000 4.800,000 2377,624
! Total . 2,518.000 $50,360,000 $11,888327
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It la not the purpose of The Progressive Fanner and Gazette to
protest against spending $50,00<MX)0 a year for fertilizers.
It la our purpose to protest against the Ignorant use of this $50,
000,000 purchase.
If the $50,000,000 *|>ent by hese States is profitable now, reason
able knowledge of fertilizer facts would make it twice as profitable.
Or to put It differently: reasonably earefiil study of soil needs, crop
needs, the functions of different ertilizing elements, etc., etc., would
add $50,000,000 a year to the profits of our Southern fanners.
And $50,000,000 U year properly expended In bond issues, as in
terest and sinking fund, would pu an eight-months' centralized graded
school within reach of every farm boy and girl in these States; would
put a macadam, gravel, or sand-clay surface on every Important road
In three States, and would carry on a campaign against tuberculosis,
typhoid fever, malaria and hooVwnrm disease that would probably
Increase by one-fifth the average length of human life.
llow fearful the waste of ignorance on one desptaed commodity!
We must make up our minds to stop this waste—not to spend
lew* for fertilizer#, hut to #pend it more wisely.
And to do this, wo must simply huekle down to learn the ele
mentary fart# about fertilizer# as we would learn a hard lesson at
*chuol.. Potash, phosphoric acid, nitrogen, ammonia, sulpluite, muri
ete., etc.,—there are only a dozen or so term# that we need to undcr
\ stand, and a little deliberate, hard thinking will enable us to master
th#«.
Your boy, if he is studying agriculture—as he should—is learning
these things in school, but you didn’t.
You can read the excellent “Reading Course on Fertilizers,” now
running in this paper from the pen of Managing Editor Miller, how
ever, and you can read the many other illuminating articles in this
issue. You can also write your State Experiment Station and Depart
ment of Agriculture for their free bulletins on fertilizers, and a
postal card addressed to “Department of Agriculture, Washington, D,
C.,” will get you free copies of Farmers’ Bulletin No. 44, on “Com
mere la i fertilizers;" No. 77, on “The Liming of Soils;” No. 102, on
“Barnyard Manure;” No. 257, on “Soil Fertility,” and No. 278, on
“Leguminous Crops for Green Manuring.”
And you might also get yonr boy's text-book on agriculture and
both of you study together the sections on fertilizera—and all the
rest of it, for that matter. It would help both of yon and pnt yon
Into closer harmony in all yonr farm work.
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Numerous other phases of the fertilizer problem are handled by
experts in other parts of this issue. The big fact we wish to drive
home on this page is simply that our Ignorance Tax on this item Is
enough to make the South a veritable Garden of Eden, if it were
saved and properly applied.
1« We waste hundreds of thousands of dollars because we won’t
learn that names of brands mean nothing at all—as Prof. Massey
illustrates In such telling fashion on our next page. It’s only the
analysis that means anything. y
2. We waste other hundreds of thousands because we use little
dribbles of low grade fertilizers, whereas the same quantities of
potash, phosphoric acid and nitrogen could be purchased more cheaply
In a higher grade fertilizer.
"e l(,8e enormously by trying to make commercial fertilizers
alone pay a profit on thin, long-cultivated lands that are literally fam
ishing for humus, vegetable matter. You might as well take a
dying of thirst and try to save him by giving him bread: he must I
have water or die. And these soils must have humus or die, so far
as profits are concerned.
4. Wliile it is often profitable to buy nitrogen as a commercial
fertilizer, we have lost millions by the indiscriminate purchase of it
for every crop, whereas scientists tell us there are 38,000 tons of
nitrogen—$11,000,000 worth—in the air above every acre of land
you own, and you have only to set the legumes (cowpeas, clover, soy
beans, etc.,) to work gathering his nitrogen from the air and storing
it in the soil free of charge.
Hut we cannot cover this big question on our first page. There are
nineteen other pages of this issue and nearly every one of them
has some big fact that should go far toward saving that $11,000,000
and more now wasted annually through ignorance of a comparatively
simple subject.