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nafex - [NAFEX] The Farm That Won't Wear Out by Cyril G. Hopkins

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  • From: charles paradise <machelp@attglobal.net>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [NAFEX] The Farm That Won't Wear Out by Cyril G. Hopkins
  • Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 17:12:55 -0500

This book is available to read free on the internet.
It's written about 1915 and I get more simple information out of
it than current books.
Two excerpts are below but you should click on the link:
http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Farm-That-Won-t-Wear-Out.html

                       The Farm That Won't Wear Out

                                               by
                                   Cyril G. Hopkins


The most valuable and trustworthy investigation on record in regard
to the comparative value of burned lime and ground limestone has
been conducted by the Pennsylvania Experiment Station. A four-year
rotation of crops was practiced, including corn, oats, wheat and hay
(clover and timothy) on four different fields, each crop being
represented every year. After twenty years the results for the four
acres showed that the land treated with ground limestone had
produced 99 bushels more corn, 116 bushels more oats, 13 bushels
more wheat and 5.6 tons more hay than the land treated with about an
equivalent amount of burned lime. At the end of sixteen years the
analysis of the soil showed that the burned lime had destroyed 4.7
tons of humus and had dissipated 375 pounds of nitrogen to the acre,
as compared with the ground limestone, this loss being equivalent to
37-1/2 tons of farm manure.

Other trustworthy experiments by the Maryland and Ohio Experiment
Stations confirm the Pennsylvania results in showing better crop
yields when unburned lime carbonate was used; and more extensive
experiments by the Tennessee Experiment Station also agree with the
Pennsylvania data in regard to the destruction of organic matter and
loss of soil nitrogen from the use of burned lime. If dolomitic
limestone is used, magnesium as well as calcium is thus added to
the soil.



THE greatest economic loss that America has ever sustained has been
the loss of energy and profit in farming with an inadequate supply
of phosphorus. Phosphorus is a Greek word which signifies
"light-bringer"; but it is a light which few Americans have yet
seen, else we should not permit the annual exportation of more than
a million tons of our best phosphate rock, for which we receive at
the mines the paltry sum of five million dollars, carrying away from
the United States an amount of the one element of plant food we
shall always need to buy, which if retained in this country and
applied to our own soils would be worth not five million but a
thousand million dollars for the production of food for the oncoming
generations of Americans.

For five million dollars we export to Europe each year enough
phosphorus for 1,400,000,000 bushels of wheat, or twice the average
crop of the entire United States. Meanwhile our ten-year-average
yield of wheat is 14 bushels an acre, while Germany's yield has gone
up to 29, Great Britain's to 33, England's to 37-1/2 and Denmark's
to more than 40 as the average for a decade.





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