Soil Fertility and Biotic Geography

It may seem a bold contention by the youthful soil science that the soil as nutrition can be a helpful criterion in mapping the geography of life forms. It is commonly granted that soil is nutrition for plant life. But we usually add that the climatic factors of rainfall and temperature must be considered along with the soil as determinants of the ecological pattern of the plants. Agricultural crops have long been mapped in their geographic distribution according as their growth requires higher or lower temperatures or more or less rain. But we can now make much more accurate assessments of the degree to which the rocks have developed into soil under the climatic forces of rainfall and temperature. Also, we can assess that development as it represents differing degrees either of soil construction or of soil destruction for nourishing those plants which offer higher contents of protein and other nutrients to foraging animals. Thus we can combine, or integrate, the climatic effects with the rock breakdown to evaluate the soil as nutrition. Since livestock and wildlife depend on vegetation for their nourishment, and since man depends on both plants and animals for his foods, should we not be able to set out the various life forms in ecological array so as to outline biotic geography according to the major factor, food? Then should we not also outline that food factor, in turn, according to the higher or lower fertility of the soil that grows it?

In the Old World the nomad was self-sufficient in providing his food, raiment, and shelter within limited but wisely chosen soil areas. He followed his herds and flocks, both of which were ruminants. He put his tent, and later his plow, where those quadruped, herbivorous biochemists had gone ahead and assayed the nutritional value of the vegetation. His moves defined the territory where his herds had declared that the fertility of the soil underlay not only the plants’ photosynthetic process of making carbohydrates but also their biosynthetic process of making proteins and all the other essential food complexes. His animals had mapped the soils that produced the food by which their bodies could grow, could be protected against disease, and could keep the life stream of the species flowing through fecund reproduction.

Fig. 1–Percentage of land in productive farms in the United States. Areas of high percentages correspond with areas of high soil fertility.

Fig. 2–Ground conductivity in the United States. The soil as one of the conductors in the radio circuit requires both moisture and fertility salts for effectiveness. Note how areas with good or excellent radio reception correlate with areas of most productive farms.

 

These beasts were making soil maps of good nutrition and issuing geographic reports that became buried too deeply in the volumes of experience of the past to be studied by later husbandmen.

In the New World the need for more land to produce more food compelled the westward venture of the colonists. This was, in part at least, a movement away from hunting and fishing, as simple food providers, to tillage of the soils, agricultural husbandry, and other better-organized means of providing food. It was a movement from the humid, highly weathered, less fertile coastal plains into the continental interior, with its wind-blown, highly fertile, but occasionally drought-stricken, silt loams. Fortunately for the indomitable courage of these early pioneers, the deeper and more productive soils of the prairies gave greater security, which converted the westward moves from foolhardy ventures into colonial strength.

The belief that science could help in the struggle for more food led to the establishment of the agricultural experiment station program in 1862 to help “make two blades of grass grow where only one grew before.” Even at that early date the study, selection, and appreciation of the soil as a biotic determinant prompted the initiation by the federal government of a national inventory of soil assets in the form of surveys and maps of soil types, and later of food-producing potentials.

The Role of Proteins

Caloric values alone are an inadequate criterion of nutritional requirements, now that microbial invasions of our bodies are viewed rather as symptoms than as causes of failing health. Granting that caloric needs must be met for sustenance of life, we are gradually coming to consider the use of carbohydrate foods in their proper balance with the protein and other protective foods. Fortunately, the proteins usually supply also the essential inorganic elements, vitamins, and other complex compounds naturally associated with them and possibly required in their syntheses. The excessively weathered or highly developed soils of the tropics grow little more than carbohydrates; extensive areas with gross deficiencies of proteins exhibit “malignant nutrition,” or kwashiorkor,¹ an ailment diagnosed not from a single symptom but rather from a breakdown of most body functions. Such hidden hungers, stemming largely from the consumption of caloric foods that fill but do not nourish, may bring us to a new mapping of our land areas according to the fertility of the soil and its bio-chemo-dynamics, through which crops can grow and synthesize the complete proteins to nourish, protect, and reproduce the higher life forms, including man. This criterion would give us an integration of the separate maps of the many individual factors–geology, rainfall, temperature, topography, and the like–as they develop the soil in terms of its potential nutritional support of the different life forms in the biotic pyramid of microbes, plants, animals, and man. Considered as the consummate factor, the productive potential for protein of the soil outlines the many ecological patterns, and thereby the biotic geography as a whole.

Climatic Factors and Protein Production

A brief examination of the pattern of annual rainfall in the United States shows the increase by longitudinal belts from less than 10 inches just east of the Coast Ranges to nearly 30 inches in the mid-continent. This increase in rainfall means increased rock weathering and resultant higher clay content in the soil. It means a higher degree of permeation of the clay’s exchange and adsorption capacity by nutrients derived from the rock minerals and not leached out of the soil in areas where precipitation is less than evaporation. It means increasing chances for the presence within the soil of all the essential inorganic elements when scanty vegetation and high winds serve to scatter unweathered minerals in the silty dust. It means extensive seasons too dry for perennial vegetation, and hence excludes the forests, yet it allows for grass, with its alternating periods of growth and dormancy during a single season.

Here, then, is soil construction in terms of providing the active fertility for protein production by the grassy vegetation. Here are the conditions that give grass the high feed quality too commonly credited to the particular species instead of to the soil. Here are the fertility requisites for the plant’s conversion of carbohydrates into proteins and into other biosynthetic products for its growth, protection, reproduction, and survival, even if deficient rainfall holds down the plant’s output of starchy and cellulosic bulk.

The increasing development of the soil eastward, with increasing rock breakdown and more clay residue, means diminution of the undesirable monovalent, alkaline element, sodium, and greater prominence for active divalent calcium, magnesium, and other essentials adsorbed on the clay and exchangeable to the plant root. It means a larger supply of nutrient elements within the mineral reserve for later weathering and more growth of virgin vegetation to give an extensive annual cycle of growth and decay. It means more atmospheric nitrogen fixed biologically into the leguminous vegetation prominent in the flora. It means more conversion of carbohydrates into proteins and greater integration of the effects of all the climatic forces developing the soil. These are the areas delineated by the herds of bison as herbivorous feeders. These are the areas that cattle and high-protein wheat today mark out for growing the carbohydrates and proteins in favorable nutritional ratio both in the vegetation and in its seeds.

Fig. 3–Generalized rainfall map of the United States.

Fig. 4–Precipitation-evaporation ratios, according to Transeau. Note the correlation between the area embraced by the 60-100-value isopleths and the corresponding areas on Figures 1 and 2.

 

Soil Composition and the Protein Potential

The still higher annual rainfall eastward from the mid-continent means still more clay production, and the resulting soils are therefore commonly described as “heavier” in texture. In the northeastern United States the clay is still a silicate mineral, much like the rocks of its origin. In chemical composition it has a wide silica-sesquioxide ratio. It has a large adsorbing and exchange capacity, recognized by its high “acidity” when it has been leached of its cation elements of nutrient value by the high rainfall and by the carbonaceous organic matter grown and decayed within the soil. These cation elements are replaced by the non nutrient cation, hydrogen, to give the clay, and thus the soil, an acid reaction.

As leaching occurs, calcium is removed relatively more rapidly than potassium.² The potassium is associated with the synthesis and storage of the carbohydrates in the plant. The calcium and other elements usually present with it in less highly developed soils are conducive to the plant’s conversion of carbohydrates into proteins. This fact is attested by the agricultural practice of liming humid soils or by the natural presence of lime if the ash-rich, nitrogen-fixing, protein-synthesizing leguminous crops are grown.

In the wet tropics notably, calcium and its services in the plant’s production of proteins and other complexes that enable its reproduction through seed formation are reduced; potassium and its service in the photosynthetic delivery of carbohydrates are increased. Plant bulk is still produced on soils that are exhausted of calcium and its protein-producing cohorts of fertility, but seed production declines or fails.³ In other words, as the soil fertility declines, the ecological array of plants contains more of the species reproducing vegetatively. This fact has been recognized by the botanist as “natural” in the wet tropics. In agriculture these soils are said to “grow hay crops but not seed crops.”

Fig. 5–Tests of soils for soluble salts across a section of Kansas and Missouri suggest soil construction in the western part (rainfall less than 25 inches) and soil destruction in the eastern part (rainfall more than 25 inches).

 

Disaster follows emphasis on crop volume and disregard of nutritional values. If the plant has had enough help from the air, water, and sunshine for the photosynthetic delivery of vegetative bulk but has had too little help from the dozen nutrient elements required from the soil to make the proteins–and the reserve of carbohydrates–in the seeds, can the entire plant consumed by the cow be more than packing for her empty paunch? Such a deficient nutrition of our livestock, and of ourselves, reflects the deficiency in soil fertility responsible for various animal diseases and human ailments, for the failure of animals to mate or reproduce regularly, and for other irregularities. These troubles are being laid at the doorstep of the veterinarian and the physician instead of being traced back to the soil and referred to the agronomist.

 

Fig. 6–As a theoretical curve of increasing weathering of rock, soil construction follows the rising curve of clay production until precipitation exceeds evaporation to give soil destruction, or a falling curve of the soil’s productivity. (Soil groups after Marbut.)

 

In the eastern United States the rock-weathering effects of the high annual rainfall are intensified by the increasing temperature from north to south. This means a clay of different mineralogical composition and chemical behavior as the result of the loss of more silica. Associated with the lower silica content in contrast with a higher content of aluminum and iron oxides is the red color of the soil. Not only is this highly developed soil destitute of reserve nutrient-bearing minerals, but the clay has little adsorbing and exchange capacity for nutrient elements as ions. Hence the plant’s roots find little in exchange for the hydrogen ions they offer to barter. Such clay will not even hold much of the non nutrient, acid-making cation, hydrogen.

Fertilizers applied on such soils have few or none of the residual effects generally recognized on soils with “acid” clays. Applied fertility is rapidly leached away and even needs to be applied intermittently during the growing season. Because they are not “acid,” these soils do not call for application of lime and magnesium, yet they are too deficient in these two alkaline-earth elements to grow proteinaceous crops, even though they have enough active potassium to grow cellulosic fiber crops and coniferous-forest vegetation.

Fig. 7–Generalized natural-vegetation map of the United States. The natural grass vegetation, of high repute for its good nutrition of animals, is related to soils that produce more protein.

 

They require heavy applications of fertilizers to grow even a fiber crop, such as cotton, or a sugar crop, such as cane. Bulk production is bountiful, and large tonnages lead the uninitiated to believe that such abundance of forage should be a bonanza for the livestock industry, if only properly bred animals could be procured. The inexperienced fails to see that the local animals are filling their bellies while starving their bodies. Instead, he pins his hopes on some particular breed for future livestock production and on impressive pedigrees. He exhibits the fallacy, increasingly common, of believing that animals can be bred to tolerate starvation.

Land areas with high temperatures, heavy rainfall, and dense virgin forest, considered casually, may be hailed with high hopes for the solution of the food problem, especially when the problem is viewed only as a matter of providing bulk. One needs but to see our southern pine forests cleared and only a single crop of corn or cotton grown before there is utter crop failure unless heavy doses of fertilizers are applied. One needs but to observe how the primitive peoples of tropical regions clear small patches in the forest to harvest scarcely more than one crop before they abandon that area and go on to another. Man has not lived well or multiplied readily in the wet tropics. Indeed, he scarcely survives there except as he keeps intact his life lines to the rivers and the sea for supplemental proteins. Carnivorousness is the dominant order of the wildlife, and cannibalism has occasionally been known for survival of man.

Land areas with sparse vegetation because of low rainfall have always been problem soils too. They have challenged our skills in irrigation, skills that, once applied, are often credited with immediate success–only to be followed by subsequent disaster. The technological responsibilities are more simply met than the biological. It is the carbohydrate foods, including fruits, that are commonly successful crops under irrigation. They point to the insufficient development under climatic forces of the coarse-textured soils commonly chosen for irrigation and, therefore, to their insufficient store of readily exchangeable nutrients for processes biosynthetic as well as photosynthetic.

Such semiarid and arid soils are usually highly calcareous. We have so long combated acidity in humid soils by adding lime that we have not appreciated the danger in the presence of too much lime. In the arid soils of the West the ionic monopoly of the exchange capacity by the calcium (or magnesium), like the ionic monopoly by hydrogen in the East, represents the deficiency of the other nutrient elements.⁴ It is expressed in the plant’s inability to get enough phosphorus, iron, manganese, copper, boron, and other elements, both major and minor, to guarantee complete nutrition of the food plants and through them the complete nutrition of animals and man. Recent research suggests the function of the trace, or minor, elements in stimulating the synthesis of essential amino acids.⁵ Trace-element deficiencies suggest deficiencies in the quality of protein, which in turn operate to exclude higher life forms or to provoke nutritional deficiencies and “diseases,” as degenerative ailments.⁶

Humid regions with lower temperatures also exhibit soils insufficiently developed for food synthesis by plants of orders higher than the conifers and tundra. Frozen soils, because of their retarded chemodynamics, fail to offer all that the vegetation requires to synthesize complete proteins. These climatic fringe areas for soil development are also fringes of soil fertility and therefore fringes of nutrition and survival in the many ecological patterns.

Plant Species and Soil Fertility

With the fertility of the soil as the nutritional starting point for life, the variable density of any life form will follow the climatic pattern, but not in terms of environmental comfort–of how cold, how warm, how wet, or how dry it may be. Rather, the densities are matters of nutritional comfort–of the degree to which the soil provides the essentials for either the simpler or the more complicated physiological performances that create the proteins and other, more commonly available, nutritional requisites. Lower densities suggest ecologically that the representatives of the particular life form are suffering from nutritional deficiencies or are disappearing, because the soil developed under the particular combination of climatic factors lacks the requisite elements of fertility. The fitness of a species in the environment of its maximum density is related to (a) the microbes within the soil, (b) the plants growing on it, (c) the wild and domestic animals, and (d) man himself. This biotic pyramid varies according to the nutritional foundation on which it rests, namely the soil fertility as the climatic pattern has developed and maintained it.

The microbial activity in the soils of the midwestern United States causes rapid decay of the protein-rich organic matter. It releases the combined organic nitrogen, which is rapidly transformed into readily adsorbed ammonia and later into soluble nitrate form whenever the soil moisture permits. The more proteinaceous and mineral-rich vegetation offers itself for decay as a microbial diet with a narrow carbon-nitrogen ratio (the same ratio exhibited, for example, in the rapid spoilage of meat). This ratio reflects the high degree of activity of all the other fertility elements along with the nitrogen that contributes to the production of the high protein content of the grasses. The grasses include wheat, of which the high protein of the endosperm and of the germ is associated with the so-called “hardness” of the grain. Nitrogen is put into the starchy, storage part of the grain because it is picked up by the roots from the greater depths of the soil later in the growing season, and after the germ is laid down.⁷ This suggests rapid decay and great mobility of the nitrogen even under moderate moisture. All this is possible only because the fertility of the soil produces a vegetation high in protein that serves as a well-balanced diet for the rapid multiplication of the microbial life forms that maintain the cycle of vegetative growth and decay. So, too, the high degree of activity of the whole list of essential inorganic elements favors the generous fixation of atmospheric nitrogen by both the free-living microbes in the soil and those in the nodules on the roots of the legumes.

The combination of the high level of inorganic fertility, the rapid growth of protein-rich vegetation, and the speedy turnover of the fertility from crop to soil and vice versa in the mid-continent and the West means that the subterranean flora is held down by the shortages of carbon as energy food. This life within the soil is not in competition, then, with the crop plants for the nitrogen and inorganic fertility supplies of the soil. The shortage of bulk production as carbohydrates by crops is due to the shortage of water; that is, of rainfall. But the scanty precipitation leaves within the soil the active offerings of both the inorganic and the nitrogenous organic fertility, by reason of which the meager precipitation is the indirect cause of protein rich vegetation of limited bulk per acre. Such vegetation has a high protein output. It suggests that the proteins required for the species, according as the soil in its climatic setting produces them, may well be considered the foremost ecological determinant in biotic distributions.

Bulk of vegetation grown in relation to the annual rainfall has been a confusing factor in biotic geography. That rainfall alone is a poor criterion is well illustrated by the fact that in western Kansas the undependable 20 inches of annual rainfall produces 40 bushels per acre of high-protein wheat, while in Missouri the more dependable 40 inches does well to grow 20 bushels per acre of a low-protein, highly starchy grain. The lower carbohydrate-protein ratio in the Kansas wheat and the higher ratio in the Missouri wheat reflect the lesser prominence in the plant’s physiology of the photosynthetic products of energy food values, and the greater prominence of the biosynthetic products of growth values, in the Kansas climatic setting and the reverse in Missouri. These in turn reflect the wider calcium-potassium ratio of the soil fertility in Kansas and the narrower ratio in Missouri. Thereby they reflect the different degrees of development of the soil, which are basically responsible for the differences in the synthetic output by the crop.

Equally illustrative of the basic principles is the physiological behavior of the microbial flora in the soils of the eastern United States, which is opposite in effect. The eastern soils, highly developed and leached under higher rainfall and temperatures, support a carbonaceous vegetation such as forests. Forest litter, resting on the surface rather than within the soil, as is the case with the prairie grasses, has a wide carbon-nitrogen ratio. On decay, it furnishes a microbial diet deficient in growth essentials and unbalanced by excessive carbon. This diet does not encourage the soil flora and fauna to multiply rapidly; hence breakdown of the litter is slow, and it accumulates on top of, or only partly within, the surface soil layer. The oversupply of energy food for the microbes, together with the deficiency of growth food, leaves them ready and waiting for any nitrogenous and inorganic elements that may become available. Such a condition makes the microbes competitors with the growing plants for the fertility available within, or applied to, the soil. It is illustrated by the fact that plowing under straw or woody vegetation is hazardous to a succeeding crop planted too near this tillage operation. The crop cannot be highly proteinaceous or rich in the inorganic essentials required for high protein output.

Fig. 8–Protein content of wheat in Kansas. In 1940, protein content ranged from 10 per cent in eastern counties, where rainfall is higher (40 inches), to 18 per cent in western counties, where rainfall is lower (less than 20 inches). After 10 years of cultivation, protein content went no higher than 15 per cent, which has remained the maximum.

 

On such soils and under such competition with the flora within the soil, the plants are given mainly to the photosynthetic process of piling up carbohydrate bulk. Although this result appeals as excellent economics in terms of sale value, it is a disappointment in terms of nutrition. For survival of plant species multiplying by seed production, soils so highly developed are ineffective, though they permit multiplication by vegetative reproduction.

Wildlife and Soil Fertility

Wildlife and domestic species both show a similar ecological pattern in relation to soil fertility according to its climatic development.⁸ The American bison as a herbivorous feeder delineated soils fertile for protein production. He roamed in largest numbers on the western plains, where today high-protein wheat is grown and beef cattle do well if they range. He wandered east and was found on some of the limited more fertile soil areas; for example, the Kentucky region made famous by the thoroughbreds, the Tennessee area of the walking horse, and some valleys in Pennsylvania. Today the deer demonstrate that they too search out the fertile soils. They browse more on cleared and fertilized forest soils; they survive better there and have a higher percentage of twin fawns.

Unfortunately, the mountain sheep and goats are being pushed away from the moderately developed mountain-valley soils that once supported them up into the rocky highlands where there is too little soil. Increased disease is the result, and the extinction of these species must be expected soon. Smaller herbivorous feeders, such as the cottontail rabbits on our farms, illustrate the pattern of greater numbers, larger bodies, and stronger bones according to the higher fertility based on higher protein production. Studies of Missouri rabbits show a decrease in body size, and in breaking strength of the femur bones, from the less well developed, more fertile soils of the Northwest to the highly developed cotton soils of the Southeast.⁹

Seed-eating forms of wildlife also take their patterns of density and size according as the climatic pattern represents either soil construction or soil destruction for protein production. The struggle for some of the soil-borne nutritional elements is exemplified in the fact that the porcupine and other rodents of the humid northern woods consume deer antlers, whereas on the semiarid western plains the antlers remain unconsumed. It is not surprising, then, that cattle pastured on those same soils of low fertility, cleared of the forests, demonstrate their deficiencies when they chew bones of the carcasses of herd members. The original wildlife pattern, if properly interpreted according to the soils and their fertilities, points the way toward successful introduction and management of wildlife today.¹⁰

Domestic Animals and Soil Fertility

Domestic animals also have troubles and successes according to the generosity of the soil in furnishing required amino acids in the plant proteins. These components are never synthesized from the simpler elements within the animal body, unless microbial activities such as the synthetic use of urea in the ruminant’s paunch are included in this category. Animal production on the highly weathered soils of the Northeast has depended considerably on protein supplements in the form of milling by-products of wheat and flax shipped from the mid-continent and the West. Our rapid exploitation of the eastern soils speedily pushed both production and markets of domestic animals westward. Today Kansas City, and not Chicago or Buffalo, is the big beef-cattle market. Protein production of high order has itself moved westward to the soils that spell specialization in this industry. Much beef is now grown only to a grass finish or less, and some is moved from the protein-producing plains to the fattening areas of the Corn Belt. Animals of highly flattened finish are marketed at the earliest possible age. The younger such an animal is, the greater is the security against abnormality as represented by a heavy load of body fat.

Westward in the wake of protein-producing plants and protein production by beef cattle there followed the substitute crops of higher carbohydrate content and the fattening activities of the animal industry. When the much heralded vigor of hybrid corn exploits the soil fertility so rapidly that the crude protein in this crop has dropped in the short span of ten recorded years from 9.5 per cent to 8.5 (mean value), will not the hog–an animal of short life span and mainly fat-delivering metabolism–soon be pushed onward also?

Fig. 9–States sized in proportion to number of beef cows on farms and ranches. Percentage figure in each state shows increase or decrease on January 1, 1947, in relation to three-year period 1939-1941. Note emphasis on the mid-continent, where quantity is lower but quality (protein) is higher. (After map prepared by American Meat Institute.)

Fig. 10–States sized in proportion to number of pigs, on same basis as Figure 9. Here emphasis is on the Corn Belt, where yields of carbohydrates are higher. (After map prepared by American Meat Institute.)

 

The dairy cow, too, reflects in her difficulties the relation to soil fertility.¹¹ She is more of an integral part of the complex of the denser human population than the beef cow, because of the perishable food product she delivers daily. Pushed, as her physiological functions have been, to even greater output of milk that is evaluated only by volume and energy content as fat, her life is so highly artificial that she can no longer assay forage and lead us to fertile soils for good nutrition as she measures it. Her failure to conceive regularly on mating is the major obstacle in dairy-herd management today, artificial insemination notwithstanding. Supplications are being offered for better breeding. Pedigrees are being worshiped. Better results from mating seemingly await the time when this idolatry will be superseded by attention to the fertility of the soil, and when this modest female will be supported by proper nutrition in playing a part in reproduction equally appreciated with that of the vaunted male.

Man and Soil Fertility

Unfortunately, the human species has not yet condescended, generally, to see itself (when hungry) as just another animal in the biotic pyramid. Instead of appreciating the precariousness of our high nutritional position in the evolutionary scale, we have assumed that high perch to be one of authority and control over the lower life forms. It has encouraged our exploitation of everything below, even to the increasing destruction of the soil that provides nutrition and health and serves as the foundation for the entire pyramid.

Patterns of human ailments are suggestive. Statistics of draftees’ health, profusely recorded in the late wars, deserve careful study. In Missouri,¹² statistics suggest that the better bodies of boys going into the Army from that state are related to better soil. Our national health pattern in terms of dental caries likewise relates this human anatomical segment of biotic geography to soil fertility. A map of the number of caries of teeth per mouth shows a minimum in the mid-continent and increasing numbers eastward and westward from that area of moderate soil development and maximum production of natural proteins. These were the conditions revealed by records for nearly 70,000 inductees into the Navy during World War II. They were carefully taken according to accurately reported regions, and for men of a mean age of no more than 24 years.¹³

Figs. 11 and 12–A map of the major soil regions of Missouri (left) reveals an interesting correlation with a map showing draftees rejected by the Army (right).

Fig. 13–Correlation between dental caries among Navy inductees, 1942, and major soil groups. A reciprocal of the curve of the climatic development of soil fertility is indicated (compare Figure 6).

 

Some Reflections on Soil Management

The decline of soil fertility in the face of increasing need for food is a challenge to our management of the soil. Based upon the many other sciences as its pioneering predecessors, the fledgling soil science suggests that agriculture can well profit by more careful study of the soils under any segment of the larger biotic pattern. Thus may be furnished a guide to fertility treatments needed to make habitable by a given domestic species soils now uninhabited by it. This calls, however, for critical cataloguing of the physiological requirements of the species to be transplanted to make certain that its needs can be met. Now that we can put soils not only under chemical tests and treatments but also under critical bio-assay of their crops, there is hope that more careful management of the soil for complete food production will provide, for a time at least, for an increasing population.

 Soil science is turning its attention toward treatments for growing the suites of amino acids required for the complete protein nutrition of the higher animals. We can no longer be content with “crude” protein measured only by total nitrogen. The technology of fertilizer production is also directing its activities to that end. If we agree with Northrop¹⁴ that “contemporary man is at once the creator and the captive of a technological civilization,” and with Gutkind¹⁵ that for the escape from that captivity “man’s expanding environment calls for the end of cities and the rise of communities;” then those communities must manage the surrounding soils for production of their required foods.

However, costs of the technologies of soil treatments by various fertilizers under present economic and taxation procedures scarcely permit the owner to maintain soil fertility at the level for bulk production of carbohydrates, much less to increase fertility and perpetuate it at the higher level required for protein-rich crops of less bulk production per acre. Increase in food quality suggests reduction in vegetative quantity except as the fertility is judiciously managed. At the present time, only 30 per cent of the production of major crops results from fertility applied to the soil; 70 per cent represents exploitation and a very small return to the soil of the food- and feed-creating capital removed from it. Viewed as the farmer’s liquidation of his productive capital (soil fertility) by selling on a buyer’s market and buying on a seller’s market (though in common thinking his sales are considered as taking a profit), the mining of the soils means an impermanent biotic geography.

Reference has been made to the case of hybrid corn, with its many bushels per acre but its decline in protein concentration. Wheat has followed a similar decline in percentage concentration of “crude” protein in the grain, as is illustrated by the major wheat-growing state, Kansas, in the last decade and a half.¹⁶ This is to say nothing about the shifts in accepted crop species that result when a failing crop is replaced because the substitute crop makes more bulk. Such shifts are powerful forces in the shift in the life forms of an area. They reflect the exploitation of the soil as the basic cause, not yet considered in the common political view of problems of agriculture, health, food costs, and the like as political issues implying the need for federal subsidy. Thinking in terms of cures rather than of prevention, and following the lessons from post-mortems rather than prophecies, we are slow to see the larger problems of populations and their struggles as premised on the fertility pattern of the soil.

We still operate largely by trial and error, too little aware of the basic facts: (a) the seasonal dynamic processes in the soil that decompose the pulverized rocks and minerals; (b) the production of the secondary clay minerals and their saturation with fertility elements; and (c) the exchange of these nutrients from the soil to the growing plant root for the acidity generated there by respiration of carbohydrates synthesized by sun power. The biological application of the sun’s energy to the synthesis of food values via the circuitous route through the plants elevates this creative process to the complexity of life-carrying proteins only in limited areas of soils highly fertile in balanced quotas for that function. These areas are not universally present on the earth’s surface. The complicated processes do not occur on every soil, even though it may be under excellent technological management. Now that agriculture has exploited the soil areas of high natural protein production, and now that we must resort to areas of lower soil fertility with the aid of fertilizer treatments, our technologies should be guided by suggestions from the ecological patterns of various life forms as related to the geography of the development of the soil fertility by the respective climatic forces. Agriculture in the future, expected to feed increasing numbers of peoples, has help in store if it will start with the premise that the fertility of the soil outlines the biotic geography.

 

References Cited:

1. H. C. Trowell: “Malignant Nutrition (Kwashiorkor),” Trans. Royal Soc. of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Vol. 42, 1949, pp. 417-442.
2. W. A. Albrecht: “Calcium-Potassium-Phosphorus Relation as a Possible Factor in Ecological Array of Plants,” Journ. Amer. Soc. of Agronomy, Vol. 32, 1940, pp. 411-418.
3. ldem: “Potassium in the Soil Colloid Complex and Plant Nutrition,” Soil Science, Vol. 55, 1943, pp. 13-21.
4. D. A. Brown and W. A. Albrecht: “Plant Nutrition and the Hydrogen Ion: VI, Calcium Carbonate, A Disturbing Fertility Factor in Soils,” Proc. Soil Sci. Soc. of. America, Vol. 12, 1947, pp. 342-347.
5. W. A. Albrecht, W. G. Blue, and V. L. Sheldon: “Soil Fertility and Amino Acid Synthesis by Plants,” Proc. Natl. Inst. of Sciences of India, Vol. 19, 1953, pp. 89-95.
6. F. E. Koehler and W. A. Albrecht: “Biosynthesis of Amino Acids According to Soil Fertility: III, Bioassays of Forage and Grain Fertilized with ‘Trace’ Elements,” Plant and Soil, Vol. 4, 1953, pp. 336-344.
7. W. A. Albrecht: “Managing Nitrogen to Increase Protein in Grains,” in Victory Farm Forum (Chilean Nitrate Educational Bureau, New York, December, 1951), pp. 16-18.
8. W. A. Albrecht: “Soil Fertility and Wildlife: Cause and Effect,” Trans. Ninth North American Wildlife Conference, 1944, American Wildlife Institute, Washington, 1944, pp. 19-28.
9. Bill Crawford: “Relationships of Soils and Wildlife,” Missouri Conservation Commission Circular No. 134, Jefferson City, 1949.
10. M. O. Steen: “Not How Much But How Good,” Missouri Conservationist, Vol. 16, 1955. pp. 1-3.
11. W. A. Albrecht: “The Cow Ahead of the Plow,” Guernsey Breeders Journ., Vol. 84, 1952, pp. 1173-1177.
12. L. M. Hepple: “Selective Service Rejectees in Missouri: An Ecological and Statistical Study” (Diss., Ph.D., University of Missouri [unpublished]).
13. W. A. Albrecht: “Our Teeth and Our Soils,” Missouri Agric. Exper. Sta. Circular No. 333, 1948.
14. F. S. C. Northrop: Man’s Relation to the Earth in Its Bearing on His Aesthetic, Ethical, and Legal Values, in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, edited by W. L. Thomas, Jr., and others (Chicago, 1956), pp. 1052-1067; reference on p. 1052.
15. E. A. Gutkind: The Expanding Environment: The End of Cities, The Rise of Communities (London, 1953).
16. W. A. Albrecht: “Soil Science Looks to the Cow,” Polled Hereford World, Vol. 6, 1952, pp. 10ff.

 

Editor’s note: Since the era in which this article was written, society’s understanding of respectful terminology when referring to ethnic and cultural groups has evolved, and some readers may be offended by references to “primitive” people and other out-of-date terminology. However, this article has been archived as a historical document, and so we have chosen to use Albrecht’s exact words in the interest of authenticity.  No disrespect to any cultural or ethnic group is intended.