SICK SOILS WILL not produce healthy plants. Sick plants will not nourish healthy animals. Sick animals will yield no income. What shall it profit us then, if our frantic search for a foolproof grass to grow on abused soil is successful?
Nationally we have become conservation conscious within recent years. We have come to recognize the threat to civilization from soil erosion. We have embraced the obvious solution, protective covering to heal the scars of wind and water, to hold the remaining surface and fertility.
But suppose we do succeed in getting the sick land back to grass? Suppose we find plants that will exist on it? They will hold the surface, which is desirable, but will they restore the land to useful production? Vegetation that will not support healthy animal life will not solve our problem.
Granting that a sod can be established, what kind will it be—sick or healthy? The query is not concerned with varieties, but with the nutritive content of herbage. Increasing cases of animal malnutrition, animal irregularities, animal diseases have been traced to feeds from the less fertile soils.
Cows sustained on the production of these soils may show symptoms suggesting milk fever in the late winter, even before calving, or before giving milk, and death may occur under similar symptoms much later in the year from an ailment called “grass tetany.” Irregularities develop during summer in the gait, particularly of the hind legs, suggesting an attempt by the animal to walk on its toes. A slight rise in the middle of the back and other skeletal deformities may be noticed. Occurrence of these ailments is closely associated with those soil types that are commonly irregular in crop production and which have been leached and exhausted of their basic nutrient elements to such a low content as would misnomer their ailment by the less informative term of “high degree of soil acidity.”
Chemical studies have been made of soil and of vegetation it produced that ailing animals consumed. When chemical findings are related to animal case histories, they designate the seat of the trouble as the low level in the soil of the nutrients essential for plants and required in larger amounts by animals. On the more “sour” soils where lime has been badly needed, but was not applied, and where nutrients other than calcium run closely parallel with it in deficiency degree, the pasture herbage has scarcely the equivalent of wheat straw in its content of calcium or lime and phosphorus.
Analyses of herbage which had defaulted in its support of a cow, and which came to the attention of a county agent as an emergency call in the absence of a veterinarian, showed a calcium content of but .27% and a phosphorus composition of only .08%. Ordinary wheat straw has .21% of the former and .12% of the latter.
The deficiency of either calcium or phosphorus might be considered serious, according to these figures. In a certain section of Minnesota, according to the late Prof. C.H. Eckles and his colleagues, the cows showed what has been known as “phosphorus deficiencies” when the phosphorus content of alfalfa fed them dropped to .21%, and that of timothy hay to .11%, and that of prairie hay to .10%. The hay samples submitted by the county agent in Missouri would not prohibit this phosphorus irregularity, if we can believe the Minnesota figures to fit the case located farther south.
The calcium contents of the Minnesota hays provoking the deficiency disease were 1.81% for alfalfa, .39% for timothy hay, and .44% for prairie hay. The Missouri grass, even though it had a sprinkling of lespedeza plants, was lower in calcium than was either the prairie or timothy hay in Minnesota, when one recalls the preceding calcium figure of .27%. Feeding cattle herbage of such composition might well be classed as a case of gross deception. Giving them green pasturage but on a soil failing to stock it to the equivalent of even wheat straw in terms of the most dominant ash constituents needed by the cow, is like bringing on the spring season but feeding a winter ration. Too bad the animals can’t prosecute under the law of mislabeled packages.
The animal’s response to the “milk fever” treatment of calcium gluconate injected into the bloodstream gives major emphasis to the calcium deficiency. It shows that the soil has not been giving the animal enough calcium, or lime, in her feed to maintain body activities. Under such soil and feed conditions she has been compelled to give up lime, and possibly phosphorus from her own body store to the point of danger to her own life in order to build the bones of the foetus. We may not be sacrificing animals on altars because of religious devotion, but we seem to be sacrificing them to false gods of a false economy that refuses to restore an exhausted soil fertility. Backbones examined after such animals have given their lives to the cause of motherhood against the handicap of existing on the feeds from these base-deficient—particularly calcium-deficient—soils, suggest that these bones have been partially consumed periodically and then rebuilt into deformed shapes. Some have been rebuilt into solid rather than flexible spines in meeting the calcium shortage during pregnancy and rebuilding during non-pregnant or non-nursing times.
Cattle owners of long experience report increasing deficiency cases. An 80-year-old founder of a fine Hereford herd says, “They are coming to be all too common lately.” His is a 49-year observation. They come now not as late in the annual breeding cycle as that period marked by the heavy milk flow just after calving. They are common, as early as two months before calf delivery. They come even in young, or growing, steers. The deficiencies in lime in the soil and their effects are so serious that fatalities among fine breeding animals and their offspring are making serious inroads into the animal supply of the country, to say nothing of the farmers’ income.
Supplementing the ration with mineral forms, such as limestone and bonemeal, may seem adequate remedy when calcium gluconate is so effective in snatching the “milk fever” animal out of the last stages before death. Before pinning hopes on such supplements, it is well to remember that the very man who started the bonemeal feeding idea, von Gohren, pointed out as early as 1861 that some unfavorable effects might be associated with it. Then, too, whenever soils are so seriously deficient in lime as to reflect it by deficiency diseases in the animals grazing on them, such soils may be expected to be deficient in other basic nutrients of which the shortage is not so simply detected. Crop removal and leaching are not confining their inroads on the soil’s supply to that of calcium alone. These other seemingly more subtle deficiencies may still remain in the ration when the lime is supposedly supplied by the mineral supplement.
Sick soils mean sick plants. Sick plants make feed that may be expected to make sick animals. When the plant factory is running short of calcium, the lime content within the plant itself can be expected to be short. Likewise a good number of other items, such as possibly the vitamins, which are manufactured by the healthy plant, may be deficient. Fertilizing the soil is more than stuffing the plant with minerals. It is a case of balancing the plant diet for better results in the plant factory just as we try to balance the animal ration for better output by the meat or milk factory.
Plant rations are much simpler than animal rations. At most, a dozen to 14 elements are all that can be of concern even when plants are grown in water or without soil. Fortunately, our soils have not gotten so low in fertility that we are immediately concerned with this total number. Limestone and phosphorus treatments to soil are the first requisites in the light of plant and animal needs, because calcium is about 8 times as plentiful in plant ash and 40 times so in the animal body minerals as in the soil. For phosphorus, the corresponding figures are roughly 140 and 400, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Other nutrients are not put into the plant or animal body in such large concentrations in contrast to that in the soil and the need for them is not serious. Remedying the plant ration by lime and phosphorus additions mainly to the soil will relieve us of remedying the animal ration in many cases, and will be much more simple than tinkering with animal physiology which is infinitely complex.
A simple soil treatment, like liming, can do much for the animal’s sake in terms of higher content of minerals and protein in the forage part of the ration. Limestone applied to lespedeza has demonstrated its effects in many places. In one case it increased the lime content almost one-fifth. It was instrumental in helping the plant to rustle enough phosphorus out of the soil to increase the concentration of this nutrient element by one-fifth. It was instrumental in helping the plant to rustle enough phosphorus out of the soil to increase the concentration of this nutrient element by one-fifth. It enabled the plant factory to pack more than one-fourth more protein into each pound of hay, to say nothing of the yield increase per acre in all of these items.
From the cow’s standpoint her factory can be more efficient when her feeds are, roughly, one-fourth more concentrated in the items she needs. Other cases—not only of lespedeza—but of alfalfa and non-legumes tell of the same effects by even so simple a soil treatment as liming and suggest the soil as an opening to a simple attack on the animal deficiency problem. Certainly from the standpoint of the farmer, cures effected by soil treatment, through the plant, and to the animals, offer more hope than attempts to diagnose and prescribe for them after they become sick.
Mining our soils of their fertility is bringing us face to face with the simple fact that plant factories are not running as efficiently for feed production as they once did. That wasn’t so very long ago. Our farm meat and milk factories are, consequently, also operating on less efficient levels—all our knowledge about better nutrition notwithstanding. Hope lies not so much in diagnostic surveys in the animal factory but more in the simpler approach to treating the animals to more nearly normal nutrition by way of normal feeds grown on fertile soils.
Humans, too, persons subject to hay fever, are vitally concerned in this matter of soil fertility if doubling of case numbers in the last 25 years is an indication. Prolific pollen-producing plants are the only survivors when declining soil fertility supports only widely scattered plants that must cross-pollinate over the greater distances between them. We can look for more pollen in the air and more hay fever as soil fertility goes down.
That sick soils will not make healthy animals is particularly significant at this time. We are thinking on a national scale of combating soil erosion by allowing much of the fertility depleted soil to go back to grass. In our desperate search for varieties of plants that will exist on such soils, perhaps we have given too little thought to whether the forage so grown would be put by the cow on her list of dietary delicacies. Perhaps we may well give ear to the voices of the many animals in their unattended deficiency ailments. They are seemingly shouting, “Don’t let land merely ‘go to grass.’ Why don’t you use sound methods of grass farming through soil-fertility restorative treatments requisite for good feed production and quicker and better soil cover?” Attention to the evidence of soil deficiencies as given by the dumb animals will react with profit both individually and nationally. Soil treatments also will serve the purposes of erosion control more effectively in the better cover developed more quickly.