Declining soil fertility because of decreasing return of organic matter has brought in the Mesquite where once there was a cattleman’s paradise. (Upper photo 1903, lower photo 1943.) (Photo courtesy of U.S. Forest Service.)

You will recall that westward from the Mississippi River, or even from some distance east of it, there were the prairie grasses on the prairie soils. These lands were not growing herds of domestic cattle when the pioneer first ventured into that region.

There on the prairies was the soil that was naturally built for better herds. There were the soil contents as nutrients that can be put through the modern chemical tests and bio-assays to give us a good pattern soil for beef production. There was the fertility condition toward which we can build up the fertility of the other soils by the necessary soil treatments. That is the kind of soil that we want to duplicate when we use lime, nitrogen, phosphate, potash, magnesium, and the less prominent, or “trace,” elements as treatments to improve our soils.

Prairie soils were fertile in calcium or lime. Streaks of this were found down in these soils within a few feet of the surface. They contained reserves of minerals supplying other nutrients. Those soils were acid enough to break down and make these nutrients available to plants. Legumes were growing naturally and thereby providing feeds that were growing young animals rather than merely fattening old ones. Soils were not as acid as those farther east. On these more eastern soils today we know that the difficulty in growing the mineral-rich, protein-producing crops for more efficient feeds is due to the absence of calcium and other fertility that went out when the high rainfall and heavy cropping put acidity there in exchange for them.

The prairie soils were well supplied with nitrogen, because when once it was taken from the air by the legumes to construct their vegetative bulk and then either grazed off by the bison or left in the grass, this fertility element went back in humus form on the death of both. The soils’ contents of phosphorus were assembled from the rock minerals by the searching plant roots. This element was left in bountiful quantities in the surface soil layer in the organic and highly available form by this cycle of growth, death and decay in place.

Forest Soils Present Soil Problems for Livestock Production

While the prairie soils of our mid-continent still support herds today, they do so less effectively according to the proportion in which we are depleting the soil fertility by moving it off the farm in the grain and the livestock. Our declining soil fertility has been pushing beef cattle westward. This movement, some might say, is due to economics. But when the “hard” wheat, or high-protein wheat, is also marching westward, it may not be erroneous to see the animals as the protein manufacturing part of agriculture, going west when the protein producing plants go out there, because the needs for lime and other fertilizers for them on our other soils are constantly growing more serious.

Perhaps you will grant that the exhaustion of soil fertility caused the movement of the big beef cattle market from the East to Chicago years ago and its movement lately from there to Kansas City. When we remember that the soils of the eastern and southeastern United States were originally low in their fertility because this was washed out by high rainfalls, we can readily understand why our beef animals can reproduce and be grown more efficiently after those soils are treated with limestone and other fertilizers to correct the fertility deficiencies. Such treatments make better herds. These result because soil treatments make the once-forested soils and their forages more nearly like those of the original prairies, where protein production as well as carbohydrate production was more readily possible.

If the soils were originally forested, they were then already relatively low in fertility even before we cleared them. They were providing potash, which helps the plants use the air and rain water to build carbohydrates, that is sugar, starch, and cellulose to make their wood. But potash is rather badly out of balance with other less prevalent elements for the plant diet that would enable the plants to make protein and big seed crops. The diet for the vegetation was already too low in calcium or lime, which is the soil requisite that we in the eastern United States associate with protein production, for example, by legumes and with good bone development and body growth in young animals. The plants’ diet is out of balance for the manufacture of very much protein when that diet is growing only forests naturally. Soils in forested areas are deficient in one or more of the essential inorganic elements, and thereby deficient in furnishing a complete list of the fertility elements.

The cattle grazed first the areas of barley where the drill turned around in drilling out the corners and doubled the amount of fertilizer applied. They grazed this down closely while the rest of the barley was disregarded. (Photo by E. M. Poirot, Golden City, Missouri.)

Soil Treatments Make Bigger & Better Animals

That we can apply lime, phosphate and other fertilizers and then get response by the animals has been shown: (a) by their choices in grazing of the treated soils first; (b) by their greater gains or young animal growth on forages from fertilized soils; and (c) by better reproduction on treated soils.

On many so-called “acid” soils one needs only to apply limestone, gypsum, old plaster, cement, acetylene waste or other calcium fertilizers as a streak across the pasture to see how the cattle will keep this grazed closely in contrast to the taller grass in the rest of the pasture. Such demonstrations have been numerous by the Missouri farmers, already well given to feeding their animals better by treating their soils.

Most any soil treatment that makes up a deficiency in the fertility of the soil to balance the plants’ needs more completely, seems to make forage of greater preference by the grazing livestock. When the cattle exercise a choice of forage in the field, can we not expect their growth rate to be higher from it, just as we know it is for the hog exercising its choice at the self-feeder?

Experimental trials with lambs at the Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station demonstrated better gains and from the same amounts of hay consumed daily, according to the kind of fertility treatments that were put on the soils of a series of adjoining plots growing this feed. In a 63-day feeding period, soybean and lespedeza hays were grown on soils given (a) no treatment, (b) superphosphate, and (c) lime and phosphate to feed seven lambs in each pen. The animals gained eight pounds per head with the hays from the soil given no treatment. They gained 14 pounds per head during that period from the hay that was grown on soil given superphosphate. Their gain, however, mounted to 18 pounds per head when they were given the hays grown on land using the soil treatments of both lime and superphosphate.

More significant, however, than these results from the soil treatments in giving better growth were the effects on the mating with the ram the next fall. Animals were bred either with difficulty or failure in the next mating season, except those which had been fed the hays from the soil area treated with both lime and phosphate. In the purchase of hay one would scarcely ever imagine that its low quality might be cause for failure of the ewes to breed, and that it might affect returns annually on their potential reproducing power.

There is plenty of evidence that on our commonly considered “acid” soils—which are in reality deficient in fertility because the fertility had to go out to let the acidity come in—we are liming them with benefit from this calcium fertilizer, not only for growing more crop bulk as tons and bushels, but also for growing our animals more efficiently and for improving their production.

Soil treatments using phosphate are proving to us that this element is put into the soil to come up through the crops, and to bring with it some synthetic effects from the plants which, like those from calcium, cannot be duplicated by putting inorganic forms of these into the mineral feed box.

Other elements are doing likewise. Copper put on the soil as only a few pounds per acre in South Australia has “cured” sheep that were producing the undesirable, so-called “steely” wool. As little as two pounds of cobalt per acre used in Scotland “cured” sheep troubles known and feared for a long time. Perhaps manganese, used as a cure for perosis in chickens when added along with these other “trace” elements as soil treatments, may soon demonstrate its value in this way also. If it, along with these others, should reduce a baffling disease like Brucellosis as may be suggested from some effects thereby on undulant fever, then better nutrition coming via the soil becomes protection against a baffling disease, and one supposedly transmitted from the animals to man. This protection would be obtained by humans according to the degree in which the animal is first protected by specific fertility additions as soil treatments.

Perhaps through relief of human misery in diseases and hidden hungers we shall find the way to banish what may be hidden hungers for our livestock, too. Out of all this may come benefits. We may eventually see that what is a healthy deficiency may go back to the deficiencies in the fertility of the soil. The time is here right now for us to build up from the soil fertility, not only the bigger profits with cattle, but also to build our own selves better in many other ways through soil conservation, just as cattlemen are building better herds by building better soils.