Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

Great as are our harvests, we are not raising much more than enough for our present needs. Each year we are using more of our food at home, and have less to export to other countries. In a few years more the public lands will all be taken, and there will be comparatively little more land than we now cultivate to supply a population that will be many times as great as at present.

Men who watch the great movements of the world tell us that the time is coming before many years when there will not be food enough to supply all our people, when we shall be buying food from other countries instead of selling to them, when we shall have famine instead of plenty unless we realize the danger and at once set about to make the most of every acre of our land.

James J. Hill, the great railroad builder of the Northwest, and one of the best informed men of the country on food production and the increase of population, is doing a great work in pointing out these dangers to the people on every possible occasion.

Watching the great food-producing region of the country, he has noted that each year the yield per acre is growing less, and the population steadily more. He tells us that when our first census was taken only four per cent. of the people lived in cities, that fifty years ago one-third of the people lived in cities, and two-thirds in the country, that is, two-thirds of the people were furnishing food to the remainder. Now conditions are almost exactly reversed. Only one-third remain in the country, and must supply the food, not only for themselves, but for all the two-thirds who are not food producers, so that the food supply is lagging far behind the demand. The price of corn has advanced from twenty-five cents to sixty-five cents a bushel in ten years, and this in turn raises the price of live stock. And so all along the line. Prices are growing higher all the time because not enough food is being produced to supply the demand.

So we can see that it is absolutely necessary that the soil be properly cared for if we are to continue to increase and prosper, for as Secretary Wilson has said, "Upon the fertility of the soil depends the whole business of agriculture."

The soil is exhausted in two ways: (1) By erosion, or the carrying away of the entire soil itself. (2) By so using the soil that one or more of its principal elements are worn out. We shall consider this form of soil exhaustion first, because it more directly concerns the work of every farmer.

By a fertile soil is meant one that has an abundance of plant food in the proper proportions. The soil contains all the elements that are needed to support life, but they are in an inorganic form, that is, they are lifeless. Plants alone can take these inorganic substances from the soil, and change them into starch, sugar, fats, and protein. All animals, including man, must get these substances through plants, or through other animals that have already absorbed them from plants.

The soil contains ten elements that are absorbed or assimilated by plants. These are: (1) lime, (2) magnesia, (3) iron, (4) sulphur, all of which are found in most plants in very small proportions, and are present in most soils in quantities far beyond the needs of crops for ages to come; (5) carbon, which is obtained by plants through their leaves directly from the air and the sunshine; (6) hydrogen and (7) oxygen, which are taken from the water in the soil and carried to the leaves, where they also help to take the carbon from the atmosphere. With none of these elements, then, does the farmer need to concern himself in regions where the water supply is abundant, as they are, and will continue to be, plentifully supplied by nature. But the other three, (8) nitrogen, (9) potassium, and (10) phosphorus, are needed by plants in large quantities, and are taken from the soil far more rapidly than nature can replace them.

All these elements are necessary to plant life, but some plants require a large amount of one element, others a small proportion of that, but a large amount of some of the others. No two varieties of plants require exactly the same proportions, so it is easy to see that the plant that takes out of the soil any one element makes the soil less capable each year of producing a good crop of the same kind.

In the early days of farming in this country, it was the custom to grow a single crop, which had been found to give good results, year after year in the same field. In Virginia and other near-by states nearly all the best land was given every year to the cultivation of tobacco, which exhausts the soil rapidly. In the states farther north other crops were planted in the same way. As a result, some of the most fertile soil in Virginia, the Carolinas, Massachusetts, and other eastern states has been so exhausted that it is no longer worth cultivating. Everywhere throughout the New England states are to be found these worn-out farms, and, while they were never so fertile as the lands of the Mississippi Valley, each one was rich enough to support a family in comfort, with something left to sell; but because they were required to produce the same crops, and so take the same element from the soil, year after year, they have become so lacking in one of the essential elements that they are unfit for cultivation, and have been abandoned.