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Show HANDLING RUN-DOWN SOIL IN CORN BELT i ' I- - I Field of Oats and Cowpeas. (By CARL VROOMAN, Assistant Secretary Secre-tary of Agriculture.) The best and shortest cut to profitable profit-able yields on a run-down farm in the corn belt generally is to be found through legumes and live stock, says Farmers' Bulletin 704 of the United States department of agriculture. This bulletin is the work of Carl Vrooman, the assistant secretary of the department. depart-ment. Its purpose is to suggest to the corn-belt farmer of the middle West some ways cf applying scientific agriculture agri-culture to the practical business of farming. It is intended especially for the farmer whose soil has been run down by continuous grain farming. The early portion of the bulletin, therefore, there-fore, contains a number of fundamental fundamen-tal rules for handling the soil. These are in part as follows: (1) Put humus into the soil. That Is the first npve toward building up a run-down farm. Humus is the stuff with which nature fertilizes uncultivated unculti-vated soils the rotted remains of dead leaves and grass, of weed stalks, fallen logs, plant roots and the like Without humus the soil would be merely mineral matter, just rock more or less finely ground and decomposed. Organic matter increases the water-holding water-holding capacity of the soil, and as It rots down to form humus it furnishes organic plant food for bacteria and plants, and by chemical action increases in-creases the available supply of mineral min-eral plant food that comes from the fine rock particles in the soil. (2) Establish a sound and regular rotation of crops. It Is difficult to make a general rule as to crop rotations, rota-tions, because rotations vary with local conditions, but there are some rules in this regard that hold anywhere. any-where. A two-year rotation, such as corn and oats, is entirely inadequate. Every rotation should include at least one legume crop. The rotation should be planned with the aid of your county agent or your state agricultural college col-lege to fit the individual farm and local conditions. (3) Select your crops to suit your soil. Some farms have grown crops that have depleted the humus and diminished di-minished the productivity of the soil until it is no longer possible to grow profitable crops of corn, oats and timothy. tim-othy. Yet such soil will often produce good crops of some annual legume, such as soy beans or cowpeas. Where nature grows sweet clover you can grow sweet clover, too, and after you have plowed under a crop of. that rank growth you have a good start on the road to fertility. Remember, there's a legume crop for almost every soil, and that no rotation is complete without a legume. Try to find the legume le-gume best suited to your soil and conditions, con-ditions, and then make it the basis of your rotation. (4) Use drain tile freely. Artificial drainage is a factor of greatest importance impor-tance in soil improvement; often the factor of greatest importance. In enables en-ables us to grow potatoes or onions where nature can grow only cattails, because it insures the even distribution distribu-tion of both the water and the air that our cultivated crops demand. Where the land lacks natural drainage, everything every-thing else depends on how thoroughly the soil is ditched or tiled. (5) Suit your plowing to your soil. As a rule, the harder the soil is to break the deeper and the more thoroughly thor-oughly it must be broken up to let air in to do its work. (6) Manure as regularly as you harvest. har-vest. Stable manure is the best form of fertilizer, because it not only adds available plant food but also improves the physical texture of the soil. It tends to lighten heavy soil and to make sandy soil hold more water. Stable manure contains easily available avail-able plant food, both organic and mineral, min-eral, and as it decays in the soil hastens the liberation of other plant food. Green manure is an excellent substitute for stable manure, and is essential to good farming where little or no live stock is kept. Where stable manure is not available, green manure must be used to get results. Not merely stubble, but the entire" green crop must be plowed under to make a green manure crop a good substitute for stable manure. In the case of a legume manure crop the seed should be saved, but all the rest of the crop should he returned to the land. (For fuller details on soils, see Farmers' Bulletins 245 and 406.) (7) Correct soil acidity with lime. Lime is the one thing most needed by the average run-down soil. . It is perhaps per-haps safe to say that more poor crops are due to sour soil than to lack of plant food. Certainly most of the failures fail-ures of clover and other legumes are due to soil acidity. On our soils lime is needed to neutralize the acid. If your sod fields show patches of red sorrel, moss, poverty grass, and the like, scanty or sour-tasting vegetation, and if your legume crops fail to respond re-spond readily to application of stable manure, try lime. (8) Use phosphates when needed. Phosphorus, next to lime, is the mineral min-eral plant food probably most needed by the average unproductive soil. |