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Show 'Inoculated Legumes CaptureMoreNitrogen Bacteria Living in Soil Often Impotent Greatest need of farmers in meeting meet-ing their wartime crop production goals is nitrogen and their ablest allies in meeting this need are the legume bacteria, capable of staking nitrogen from the air. Inoculation of alfalfa, clovers, soybeans, peas and beans with selected strains of nitrogen-fixing bacteria often enables en-ables their legumes to harvest from one to two hundred pounds of nitrogen nitro-gen per acre. Legume bacteria vary in their ability to aid legumes in taking nitrogen ni-trogen from the air. According to a report by Wayne Umbreit in Wisconsin's Wis-consin's latest edition of "What's New in Farm Science" "on the average, av-erage, only about one-fourth of the root-nodule bacteria found in the soil "lit ii'f The roots of this red clover plant are full of nodules, showing excel- . ient bacterial action. The clover seed was inoculated before planting. are good nitrogen-fixers, one-half are fair and the remaining - one-fourth one-fourth poor. This means that if farmers depend on bacteria in the soil to inoculate their legume seed, under most conditions they are likely like-ly to get only from one-fourth to one-half as much nitrogen as they might with good, fresh cultures." Since there is no way of determining determin-ing before seeding whether the soil contains sufficient numbers of the right kind of bacteria and the average av-erage cost of inoculation is no more than ten cents an acre farmers can well afford to invest in this low-cost form of crop insurance. Either the humus or agar type of inoculant gives satisfactory results. Umbreit ( points out that root-nodules bacteria , are not "at home" in the soil they are "refugees" there during the periods pe-riods between legume crops. They may find survival most difficult in acid soils, which makes inoculation almost essential under those conditions. condi-tions. Even then the soil should be limed to assure successful stands of legumes. |