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Show Poor Land Yields Well When Fertilized Proper 'Nutrition' Doubles Production "All our best land is producing to its limit," said Dr. Scarselh of Purdue Pur-due U., "but our poor lands are loafing because like an assembly line where one vital part is missing they are lacking in one or more of the plant foods needed to keep up production. Right now, we can't hope to get the amounts of fertilizer that are necessary to bring them into full production, but if and when food becomes more important than ammunition, these poorer lands offer of-fer a great and immediately available avail-able potential production capacity." In telling how bottlenecks in plant hunger can be broken, Dr. Scarseth described some experiments which the Purdue experiment staff have been conducting in Indiana on thin silt loams that had little of the juice of life left in them after years of taking tak-ing 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 ferti-lizer that the soil needed, and when that fertilizer was put in the right place, this land produced 92 bushels of corn per acre. "Under the old methods, the crop was produced at a loss," he explained, ex-plained, "but under the new methods meth-ods it yielded a net profit of $26 an acre." The experiments were started five years ago by Purdue U. experiment experi-ment 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 profita-ble production in one year. Assigned to the experimental work with Dr. Scarseth were Harry D. Cook, Alvin Ohlrogge and Burt A. Krantz. "The first bottleneck encountered in the nutrition of corn," he said, "was lack of nitrogen in the midsummer mid-summer season when most needed by the plants. In breaking this bottleneck bot-tleneck 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 sys-tem puts the fertilizer down where the roots are going to operate; five to six inches deep. A special attachment attach-ment to mount on the plow was developed de-veloped 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. Scarseth further pointed out that the pattern of results In diagnosing diag-nosing plant hunger and then supplying supply-ing 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 same. |