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Quality of Crops Also Depends on Soil Fertility
Published in Victory Farm Forum, June 1948
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It is a familiar advertising slogan that says “The quality will be remembered long after the price is forgotten.” Implied in this are the simple facts that price is only an arithmetical number; it fixes itself in our minds readily; it is quantitatively cataloged; and its relations and implications are clearly understood. Quality, however, is not so simply measured, not so instantly recognized, and not so completely cataloged. The appreciation of quality is more often a matter of time and experience with the goods. The importance of quality grows on us slowly and thereby gives us time to forget the price while the conviction grows that quality is after all the real value. Concerning the quality of our agricultural products in relation to the fertility of the soil a much stronger conviction is yet to be expected.
In dealing with the soil as the basis of production, yields in bushels, bales, and tons per acre, have long been the orthodox yardstick. These are quickly ascertained, easily tabulated, and readily subjected to mathematical manipulations. However, when the productivity of the soil pushes itself into making those bushels and tons more directly our own human food, then quality takes its place as the foremost criterion by which soil should be evaluated. In agricultural production we are slowly coming to consider the higher quality in our foods and feeds grown on fertile soils as more important than our transitory reactions to questions of price only. We are beginning to see declining soil fertility causing declining quality in our agricultural products, despite our struggles to maintain their quality and price. Quality as a criterion for agricultural (food) production is taking on increasing importance.
Land as an economic asset is measured in acres. Soil as the foundation of the agricultural industry is also measured too commonly in the same two dimensions–length and breadth. Soil as the agricultural creative capacity must include a third dimension, namely depth. Now that erosion by removing surface soil in the humid areas, has exposed much of the infertile subsoil there, we have gained rather forcibly a new appreciation of the productive quality of the upper horizon of the soil profile.
Yield varies both as quantity and also as quality according to the depth of the surface soil. Shallow surface soils are considered “droughty.” We are prone to believe that a shortage of water is responsible for the lowered yields of corn on thin soils even when the roots are taking water from the moist subsoil. The real trouble is that the roots are not finding there the fertility required. Bushels per acre are reduced. So is the feeding value per bushel and ton of both grain and fodder.
Quality of the crop does not vary directly with the quantity. Quality drops lower and faster often than the quantity. It may also improve faster than quantity increases. An increase in the depth of the surface soil does not necessarily represent merely a corresponding increase in capacity for quantity production while doubling the depth of surface soil may double the yield, it may improve quality even more.
The mass of the soil is not an indication of the fertility adsorbed on the clay or of that held as nutrient reserves in the mineral other-than-quartz making up the skeleton of the soil. Nor is the soil mass an index of the active organic matter with its dynamic values rising and falling as the cyclic temperature of the season controls its behavior to make it correspond more closely with the demands of the growing crop. Quality of the soil, that is its well-balanced supply of fertility, is beginning to stand out in our minds more prominently than do land dimensions either as acres or as depth of the soil. Soil conservation is also coming to be recognized as something more than keeping the body of the soil at home on the farm. It involves, also, the development of a deeper, more fertile and therefore, a stronger soil body.
Crop quality in its relation to soil fertility may have different properties and values in our minds. There is, however, no confusion about crop quantity. In the mind of the baker quality of wheat refers to its gluten, that is protein, content. This same quality in the mind of the farmer has been characterized as the “hardness” of the wheat. The miller, too, is interested in this quality because he makes the flour purchased by the baker. As the purchaser of wheat from the farmer and as seller of it to the baker, he, too, is concerned with this quality. The volume and the weight of the loaf of bread can be larger from the use of less flour according as there are more of these qualities centering around the protein in the wheat and in the flour made from it. The miller and the baker, then, search the market for quality first because it determines their volume of output and margin of profit. For them quality comes first and quantity second.
Quantity vs. Quality
For the farmer the volume of output is important too. But his volume is a quantitative matter of bushels of wheat per acre. Even though there may be some premium for “harder” wheat, this extra earning per acre by higher quality is small in contrast to the greater monetary gain he can make from more bushels per acre.
It is quality that is wanted by the baker, who uses the flour, as he looks to the market offering him his necessary goods. It is quantity that is wanted by the farmer as he looks to the same place to purchase from him the goods he has for sale. Unfortunately, the consumer and the producer in this case do not meet each other. Nor do their separate desires meet through the common market. Both are content to serve the market rather than each other. Consequently, when lowered fertility in the surface soil layer makes many bushels of “soft” wheat with its low protein, the farmer sees his desires well satisfied by the market. He is then blind to, and unconcerned about, the desires of the miller and the baker on the other side of the market. They, too, do not see the declining quality of the soil–especially its declining nitrogen supply–as the reason for the increasing quantity of “soft” wheat in place of “hard” wheat of the high quality they desire. They may accuse the farmer of growing a poor variety, selected for quantity production when in fact he had been compelled by declining soil fertility to use it in consequence of which his quality declined while quantity increased.
The quality of corn, like that of wheat, is also premised on soil fertility. We have recently seen increased production not only because of higher rainfall in the western fringes of the cornbelt from which increases in the national corn crop usually come, but also from the increased yields per acre in the cornbelt proper. At the same time, livestock feeders have been clamoring for help in providing more protein supplements. Corn producers and consumers have been oblivious to the fact that while there had been a tremendous increase in quantity there has been a serious decrease in quality amounting as protein to almost one-tenth of the total production. It has been reported that during the last ten years the protein content of corn has fallen from an average of near 9.5 to 8.5 per cent. Fattening power in the form of the starch of the grain has increased. Growth power in the form of protein has decreased. Consequently, while steers feeding on the corn may do well in laying on fat, they may not be building a muscular and bony structure strong enough to carry the extra weight to the market.
Starch production with its fattening and fuel values calls for little soil fertility. It calls more for air, water, and sunshine to fabricate this energy-providing food substance. Protein production, however, calls for nitrogen, calcium, and many other items from the soil in addition to the carbohydrates within the plant before it consumes much of its own supply of this photosynthetic product while it converts a part of it into the different amino acids of which the life-carrying and body-growing compound of protein consists. Soil fertility is in reality the foundation of quality in the cereal crops. But, unfortunately, while watching the bushels of wheat and of corn increase to our economic satisfaction, we have been slow to see the decrease in quality or in protein that determines life itself.
While cereals vary some in their quality, according to the fertility of the soil growing them, the legume crops in their failures or successes vary more widely. We are learning rapidly that insufficient soil fertility shows greater deficiencies in the legumes which may adversely affect the quality of the animal products and even the animals that consume them.
As we proceed in the biotic pyramid, that is, from soil to plant and animal, the effects of deficiencies in soil fertility assume larger proportions. Oblivious of this fact, we have not generally appreciated the variable feed quality of legume hays and forages according to the fertility of the soil growing them. We have recognized the greater difficulty in growing legumes than cereals but have not been so quick to see the seriously low nutritional value in legumes when they are barely surviving and when we minister to them by means of only one kind of soil treatment. When a single treatment like superphosphate is used, the lespedeza crop, for example, seems much improved if judged on tonnage alone. But when the hay is fed to sheep, these animals make only a fair gain. More significant, however, the animals fail to grow a wool that will last through the scouring process and that can be carded and used in the manufacture of fabrics.
Quite different is the nutritional quality of the lespedeza when the soil is given both limestone and phosphate. The yield as tonnage is increased only slightly. But when fed to the sheep their growth rate is increased, while the wool is heavily loaded with yolk and comes out of the scouring process as readily cardable fibers fit for fabric manufacture. This physiological product of the animal reflects the difference in soil quality more pronouncedly by its widely variable quality than does the animal, the legume, or the cereal in the declining order of irregularities in these different products dependent on the soil.
Here then the deficiency in calcium of the soil reflects itself in the cereals but dimly. It reflects itself more prominently in the legumes, quite decisively in animal growth, but disastrously in the animal products. This chain of differences showing increasing magnitudes with distance from the soil holds in similar manner for deficiencies of copper in the soils of Australia. Shortage of copper there may not seriously disturb the yield of wheat; it may give only a suggestion of its deficiency in animal behavior; but it will be clearly evident in the “steely” wool which the inspector quickly recognizes and discounts on its poor quality.
In this series of products with increasingly specific decreases of quality because of the soil deficiency–going from soil to cereals to legumes, to the animal body and then to the animal products–we are moving from mainly carbohydrate products and photosynthetic activities toward more protein and biosynthetic performances as the major part of our concern. Decreasing quality, then, in this apparent distance from the soil points to magnification of the soil deficiencies in nitrogen and other fertility elements connected with all the life processes centering in the protein molecule. Quality in agricultural products is calling for more soil fertility by which to make proteins rather than bulk, the promiscuous but simple chemical composition of which permits its production on many soils where protein production of significant food import is almost an unknown.
When the Old World has been pointing out to us that its food problem is one of protein rather than of calories, and when war rationing made us conscious of the same thing in our own food problem, shall we not move rapidly to believe that high quality in cereals, in legumes, and in animal products call for more fertile soils to increase in these their concentrations of proteins and minerals as well as the quantities of them? To date quantity has been our criterion of production even to the extent of detailed statistical treatment of the simple figures reporting them. But good nutrition, fecund reproduction and what we call good health in any form of life do not depend on the quantity, but rather on the quality, of the products consumed. Such quality in the final analysis must carry through from the soil as the starting point of the creation of quality as well as quantity.