Show 1 I 1 fi r poor land yields well when fertilized proper nutrition doubles production all our best land is producing to its limit said dr of purdue U but our poor lands are loafing because like an assembly line where one vital part para is missing they are lacking in one or more of the plant foods needed to keep up production right now we cant hope to get the amounts of fertilizer that are necessary to bring them into full production but if and when food becomes more im important than ammunition these poorer lands offer a great and immediately available potential production capacity to in telling how bottlenecks in plant hunger can be broken dr described some experiments which the purdue experiment staff have been conducting in indiana on thin silt loams coams that had little of the juice of life left in them after years of taking out plant foods and returning little or nothing from 29 bushels to 92 A certain soil he said was so worn out that it produced only 29 bushels of corn an acre where no fertilizer was used but when given the right dosage of the kind of fertilizer that the soil needed and when that fertilizer was put ia in the right place this land produced 92 bushels of corn per acre under the old methods the crop was produced at a loss to he explained pla ined but under the new methods it yielded a net profit of 28 26 an acre the experiments were started five years ago by purdue U experiment station to find out if possible what it takes to step up the period of poor soils in double quick time and to bring them back into profitable production in one year assigned to the experimental work with dr were harry D cook alvin and burt A krantz the first bottleneck encountered in the nutrition of corn he said was lack of nitrogen in the midsummer season when most needed by the plants in breaking this bottleneck the agronomists tried a new method of applying fertilizer by placing it in a band on the plow sole when turning the land this system puts the fertilizer down where the roots are going to operate five to six inches deep A special attachment to mount on the plow was developed ve loped at purdue for feeding the fertilizer down behind the plow share into the furrow as the land is plowed because nitrogen in the form of ammonium compounds since it is held firmly by the soil particles is readily available to the plant roots dr further pointed out that the pattern of results in diagnosing plant hunger and then supplying the needed elements held true in repeated experiments on poor as well as on many of the better silt loam soils results obtained with corn held correspondingly true of other crops since the principles diagnosis and fertilizer applications were the tha same |