OCR Text |
Show Bulletin Outlines Proper Soil Fertilizing With so wide an array of fertilizer fer-tilizer brands and formulas on the market, farmers of Utah were urged Tuesday to gain a sound understanding of the basic principles prin-ciples of fertilizer use by soils and fertilizer specialists of the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station. Intelligent use of fertilizers requires re-quires that each farmer study the needs of his soil, the requirements require-ments of the crop to which the fertilizer is to be applied and the plant food content of the material mater-ial he is buying, emphasized the soils experts, explaining that fertilizers fer-tilizers are only one factor in the successful production of crops. Use of fertilizers in the soils and other related factors to give , best possible crop production were outlined in a special station bulletin, bul-letin, entitled "Fertilizers for Utah Soils,'' prepared by Dr. D. W. Thome and Professor D. W. Pit-I Pit-I tman of the experiment staff, and now available to farmers in Utah. The authors of the bulletin point out that the purpose of fertilizers is to supplement , the available plant food already in soil for the production of maximum crop yields. They give special emphasis to the fact that fertilizers will not j replace such practices as crop rotation, ro-tation, organic matter maintenance tillage control of moisture and erosion ero-sion or the control of insects and plant diseases in the farm program. pro-gram. Moisture control in the soil to give best results from fertilizers fertiliz-ers applied is stressed also. The theory back of the use of commercial fertilizers is that plants require certain chemical elements for their nutrition, most of which are derived from the soil, it is pointed out. If the soil is lacking in one or more of these nutrient elements, crop growth will be retarded and yields inferior. |