Wanted Mineral for Backbone

Our attention has been so completely absorbed above the soil that the real basis of “growing things” has not been commonly examined on each farm.

With animals playing a larger part in the final accounting of production, however, we are beginning to recognize the possibility of doing something to feed our animals better by treating the soil with some added fertility. And animals tell us, unfortunately, that as meat producers they are not as certain of meat and dairy products today as they used to be not many years ago.

Much of this uncertainty may be traced right back to the declining fertility supply in the soil. When a 70 percent calf crop cuts into the margin of safety in the farming business, we are inclined to blame the bull. We have been told that he is “half the herd.” When only one animal needs to be sacrificed to correct a 30 percent trouble, we are apt to dispose of the bull and pin our faith anew on another one that may not give us even a 70 percent calf crop.

Reproduction is a delicate physiological performance. The fecundity in it, by both female and male, is influenced more by the soil than by the pedigree. Soils with depleted fertility and producing forages that are consequently deficient in minerals means that shy breeders and aborters will be more numerous. Losses through those channels alone, if corrected, may push the balance sheet in the farming books from the loss to the profit side.

Soil Deficiency-Animal Deficiency

During wintertime, feeds that are mainly of fuel value are not of great help in foetus production, which demands calcium and phosphorus in liberal amounts. When a cow calves and goes into milk production, the demand on her body for daily delivery of calcium and phosphorus goes even higher. Some soils are too deficient in these nutrients to enable the cow to go through the pregnancy period without developing acetonemia in late stages. Should she carry her foetus-building business through under strain, by sacrificing much of her own skeletal calcium and phosphorus for the offspring, she may yet break down in milk fever when the demand for the minerals arises.

“Pregnancy disease” among ewes is similar testimony when those with twin foetuses are more commonly taken with it. Rickets in calves, in spite of sunshine for vitamin D and of ample volume of milk, are occurring on soils from which the fertility has been highly exhausted. This exhaustion has reached a degree where the product of the milk is not necessarily of unvaried food value, which, even in milk, depends on the soil from which it is produced.

Animal deficiencies are pointing their fingers back to the soil and not to the drugstore. Plants given calcium and phosphorus via soil treatment do more than convey them to the manger. Plants manufacture essential food products, many probably still unknown as to composition and bodily service. They may be the means of making the animal sleek in the spring before the soil factory runs out of its raw materials. It may be the lack of these that gives us the poor animal appearance commonly ascribed to fly troubles by August.

Fortunately for better feeding values in the grains and forages for our livestock, and in the vegetable and animal products for human consumption, we are gradually putting the essential nutrient elements, calcium and phosphorus, back to the soil in a larger soil improvement program.

No Substitute

Calcium and phosphorus, or limestone and phosphate, as their compounds are called, need to become household words in the soil fertility list. There is no substitute for them, except as we will accept starvation. They need to be used more often.

Lime, or calcium, is first of the items on the chemical list in the business of farming. It has gone ahead of nitrogen now that we know that legumes given calcium and phosphorus can serve us to run nitrogen-fixing plants on every farm.

Though plants and people may be mainly carbohydrates and fats, both of which originate in fresh air and sunshine, it nevertheless takes some soil minerals to put a backbone into them–so badly needed by all of us now. It is soil and its mineral output that makes us “personalities rather than puddles.”

As fast as we realize that what must be put into the soil determines what we get out of it, we can optimistically view the future. The soil is still our main support in war or peace.