structive to property in the South during the past ten years has been materially increased through the failure of the sunbaked surface of the waste land to absorb its due proportion of the rainfall. Higher floods than formerly are now produced by the same amount of rainfall, indicating the greater rapidity of the run-off and the lessened absorption. The flood losses of the South for the past ten years aggregate more than $25,000,000, and with the multiplication of factories and towns along the rivers, this loss must continue unless the soils perform their proper function. The recent losses at Augusta, Ga., Fayetteville, N. C., Cheraw, S. C., and elsewhere are only indications of what may be expected more frequently if the large areas of the unabsorptive, close-textured clays continue to shed so large a portion of their rainfall into the rivers, without absorbing what they would if in forest or under a rational system of cultivation. Simultaneously with the increase in the floods there is a corresponding decrease in the low-water flow, seriously interfering with navigation and the value of water-powers.

reaches of Southern rivers, is expended for dredging; and the necessary expenditures to keep the channels clean of the rapidly forming and shifting silt and sand bars will in the future increase in direct proportion to the increased silt burden of these streams. In the event of the canalization of any of them, the sand deposits would continue a menace to channel depth, since the slowly moving canal water affords ideal conditions for settling.

TERRACING TO CHECK EROSION.

A very large portion of this loss and damage is avoidable. How thoroughly erosion can be checked and with what benefits to farming, as well as, of course, corresponding benefits to other industries which suffer, is shown by the results secured by deep plowing and level terracing in portions of the South. On one farm in South Carolina, with a very steep slope, a dozen terraces rise on the hill above the Congaree River to a total height of more than sixty feet. The terraces are so well leveled that there is no run-off of surface water; the entire rainfall is absorbed. Deep plowing is used as an adjunct, and plenty of humus is maintained to keep the surface soil loose, porous, and mellow, thus lessening the tendency of the heavy rains to compact the surface, and assuring the surface water good drainage through to the subsoil. On this farm the sorghum was eight feet high, while the cotton stood to the shoulder, indicating a double yield above that of the adjacent unterraced slopes where erosion yet had unrestricted action.

Industries dependent upon water-power are being disastrously affected in other ways as well. The engineer of one of the largest hydro-electric companies operating in the Carolinas publicly stated that within four years the storage capacity of reservoirs under his care had decreased 15 per cent. by filling in with earth eroded from the upper portion of the watershed. It is impossible for the power companies to check or lessen it, and there is no way to remove the deposit when once it has accumulated. The troubie lies Such level terraces are developed by confar above the dams, and the owners must structing embankments, such as are now exwitness the slow annihilation of the storage tensively used on hillside ditches in the South, of their reservoirs. It would undoubtedly except that they are located on a level, and be wise policy, however, for them, where by the use in tillage of hillside and reversible they own land surrounding their reservoirs, disk plows which always turn the furrow to protect it themselves from erosion. In down the slope. This hastens the leveling this particular, however, they are usually as process. But erosion, the very agency they careless as other landowners. Some of the are being constructed to prevent, plays its im worst-gullied lands in the Carolinas are portant part, and the rapidity with which owned by power and mill companies, and the terraces develop and leveling proceeds, every pound of soil washed from their bare indicates how rapidly erosion was taking slopes goes directly into the reservoirs, af- place. fecting the storage value.

The finest particles of silt and clay pass beyond the lowest dams and settle in the slower moving portions of the rivers near the coast and in the harbors. The greater portion of the millions appropriated by the federal Government for the improvement, or rather the temporary opening, of the lower

Terracing undoubtedly has its drawbacks in restricting cultivation, but there is with its use an enormous increase in the yield of the crops and a decrease in the cost of maintaining fertility. It is far superior in every way to the much-used hillside ditch which barely checks erosion sufficiently to make cultivation possible.

Such level terracing, breaking the field nto steps, need be used only on the steeper lopes. On more gentle slopes other methods can be employed which permit unrestricted cultivation. Either broad dykes, ighteen to twenty feet wide, located on a level, or narrower dykes on a slight incline, but following the contours of the slopes, and two to four feet vertically apart, can be employed. The surface of these dykes is cultivated like the rest of the field, and while they do not entirely prevent erosion, they considerably reduce it. But above all, deeper plowing is necessary and more humus in the soil, made from manure or by plowing under green crops, to give mellowness and porousness; the general use of cover crops on land during the winter; and more small grain and the grasses. All hillside land in corn, cotton, tobacco, or other clean tilled crop should be laid by with a cover crop of some kind.

THE PROBLEM OF THE OLD FIELDS."

SECOND GROWTH PINE THIRTY-FIVE YEARS OLD. (In eroded old field now cutting 12,000 feet of lumber to the acre, worth more than $25, and leav

ing more than one hundred small trees to grow.)

This is for the lands which are now in cultivation; and where these methods have been used not only has erosion been largely reduced, but land values have rapidly risen. The idle and waste lands, the "old fields," represent a more serious problem. It will require the addition of a million workers to the population of the South to place be taken to reduce erosion, and that when these lands again in cultivation, more than profitable and permanent cultivation is not that number if intensive cultivation is prac- possible without its being excessive, the land ticed. At the same time the movement to assure its permanent earning value must of population in the South is still toward the towns, as it should be to establish and assure necessary home markets for farm products, and it will be many years before their profitable cultivation will be possible. The soils at bottom are good and strong, and some day the greater portion will undoubtedly be needed for the use of the South's increasing population. This land can in the meanwhile be made productive with but little labor by planting trees, assuring at once its reclamation by checking erosion and some returns from the investment by the profitable use of the land. Some areas are so steep and rough that they should be permanently maintained in forest.

ENCOURAGEMENT OF TREE-PLANTING.

There is already a strong feeling in some of these States that vigorous measures must

be regarded as forest land. This feeling will undoubtedly crystallize in a decisive policy with definite plans of action. Advisable lines of action by the States for the encouragement of planting by owners might be the furnishing of seedlings of trees at the cost of growing them, and furnishing advice on the ground as to the best methods to be adopted and kinds of trees to plant, and assistance in protecting plantations from fire.

There is no doubt that it would be possible to reduce the present erosion from farm lands one-half with an enormous saving to the nation. Each of the Southern States has its own peculiar problems of this kind which must be solved at home by the brains and energy of the commonwealth itself: the preservation of the soils; the use of idle lands; the protection of the earning value of its waterways.

SAVING AMERICA'S PLANT FOOD.

GOVERNMENT WITHDRAWAL OF THE GREAT PHOSPHATE BEDS OF THE WEST TO PREVENT EXPORTATION.

BY GUY ELLIOTT MITCHELL.

THE Roosevelt Administration very steel and the tinder box, and be only incon

closely identified itself with the Carboniferous Age,-a period rich in its vast accumulations of natural supplies later to play their important world part when man should appear upon the earth,-coal, phosphates, and probably petroleum and natural gas, and it is with reference to regulating human use of these sources of energy and wealth that the Roosevelt régime has won the plaudits of some people and incurred the ( enmity of others. There is small doubt that the former are largely in the majority, and view with satisfaction the action of the Executive, several years ago, in his bold withdrawal of some 66,000,000 acres of public coal land in the great Western coal-field, then being largely acquired in a fraudulent manner as agricultural land, and for a mere song; in his instructions to the Government geologists to classify and value these lands, under the law as first so interpreted by him, -in some instances the valuation has been placed as high as $75 per acre,-in his withdrawal of other lands containing petroleum and natural gas which were being likewise fraudulently acquired and held, unproductive, for mere speculative purposes; and lastly, on December 9, 1908, in the withdrawal of some 4,800,000 acres of public phosphate lands.

The startling feature in connection with this latest action lies in the proposal to restrict the development of these deposits to that which can be shown to be for the agricultural benefit of the United States; in other words, there must be no exportation of phosphates from these deposits on GovernPossibly not since the saving of the Western coal-fields from monopolistic design has there been an executive action pregnant with such import to the nation. Phosphates, phosphorus, what of it? Useful for match-making! Should matches become too dear or impossible of production ankind could still keep warm and cook his

by simply reverting to the flint and

venienced. But phosphorus has a more vita. function, the production of growing crops, and for this large quantities are required. It is one of the three principal and absolutely essential foods for plant growth and therefore as necessary to the human race as the oxygen of the air. And it is the one such constituent of which the supply is alarmingly small. There is need here for conservation, for the greatest economy in use, for the stringent stoppage of waste.

THE PLANT'S BREAD AND MEAT. Phosphorus, potash, and nitrogen are the three elements used as principal food by all plants, and in the absence of any of the three the plant cannot grow nor even live.

President James J. Hill in his enlightening address at the White House meeting of Governors last May invited attention to the fact that America's per acre crop-yields are steadily decreasing, due to the continual depletion of soil fertility. Two remedies which he mentioned for overcoming this evil, well known but too generally not practiced, were crop rotation and the use of fertilizers as soil tonics. In this connection an inquiry into the sources and supplies of fertilizer constituency brings out some important and not too reassuring facts. Fertilizer, or plant food, consists, as stated, of three elements. Naturally they occur to a greater or less extent in all soils, but with continual cropping and the shipment of the product from the farm, the soil, as Mr. Hill says, comes to need artificial replenishment.

Nitrogen salts exist in great deposits in Chile, which will supply the world for some time to come. We have in the United States no nitrate mines or similar mineral deposits of consequence, but neither the exhaustion of the Chilean mines nor the lack of our own, need trouble us or the world. Every farmer has in reality on his own farm an inexhaustible mine of nitrogen from which he can draw at will and as fast as he

uses it the mine will be replenished with and roots a large proportion of nitrogen more nitrogen.

A VAST NITROGEN RESERVOIR.

from the air by means of small root nodules or excrescences formed by minute organisms; or pull up a clover plant and you will have The atmosphere itself contains uncounta- the mystery displayed before you. The root ble millions of tons of free nitrogen. It will show a multitude of these small nodules, constitutes over three-fourths of the composi--the nitrogen-absorbing agents. The Michtion of the air and it has recently been dis- igan Agricultural Experiment Station found covered that a great group of plants has the the nitrogen yield from an acre of cowpeas wonderful faculty of absorbing, by rea- to be 139 pounds,-all drawn from the air. son of bacterial infestation of their roots, Plowed under, or fed to stock and then apsufficient of this fertilizing element not only plied as manure, this would add to the soil to maintain but to increase the fertility of more nitrogen than through the heaviest apsoils so far as nitrogen is concerned. Plant plication of fertilizer made in farm practice. a seed of clover or alfalfa or a cowpea or a In addition to this, a recent electrical dissoy bean, or any of the populous tribe of covery has made possible the condensation Leguminosa in a pot of clean, sharp sand of the atmospheric nitrogen into the exact containing no plant nutrition, fertilize it counterpart of the Chilean product. So that with only potash and phosphorus, and it there will never be a serious shortage of this will grow luxuriantly, storing up in its leaves indispensable plant food.

ROOTS OF VETCH, SHOWING TUBERCLES.

BILLIONS OF TONS OF POT

ASH.

With the potash supply the situation is only slightly less assured. Our present supply for artificial fertilization comes mostly from the great potash mines of Germany, where the salts are found in highly concentrated form. But Prof. F. W. Clarke, in his 66 Data of Geochemistry," states that the original igneous rocks contain from 2.28 to 2.96 per cent. of potash on an average, while it is well known that there are inexhaustible mountains and mountain ranges of feldspar where the potash exists in proportions of from 7 to 9 per cent. In many of the feldspars the percentage is much higher. Cheap methods of extracting the potash have not yet been determined, but this will come later as needed, and the supply of material. is unlimited.

Now as against this Professor Clarke states that the outer crust of the earth, rocks and soil, contains not more than .11 per cent. of phosphorus, or less than